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Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
Tags: #History, #Ancient, #Rome
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Plautus ignored the warning from his father-in-law. Under the influence of two teachers of philosophy, who counseled that he “await death with firmness rather than lead a precarious and anxious life,” Plautus went about his regular routine.
11
At noon one day shortly after, he was at the bathhouse. Stripped down to a tunic and an undergarment, he was exercising before entering the baths. The doors burst open, and in trooped the Praetorian centurion and his death squad. At their head was Pelago, a freedman on Nero’s personal staff, who had been sent with the Praetorians to ensure the task was completed.
11
At noon one day shortly after, he was at the bathhouse. Stripped down to a tunic and an undergarment, he was exercising before entering the baths. The doors burst open, and in trooped the Praetorian centurion and his death squad. At their head was Pelago, a freedman on Nero’s personal staff, who had been sent with the Praetorians to ensure the task was completed.
Without any ceremony, the centurion forced Plautus to kneel on the tiled bathhouse floor and ordered him to stretch out his neck. Unsheathing his gladius, the centurion hacked off Plautus’ head, which Pelago promptly bore away. The dead man’s distraught wife, Antistia Pollutia, came running to find her husband’s headless body. Dropping to her knees, she clutched Plautus’ corpse to her, ignoring the blood that covered her clothes. For the rest of her short life, Pollutia would retain the bloodstained garments worn by her husband at the time of his violent end.
The removal of Sulla and Plautus brought no outcry at Rome. This lack of public reaction, along with the very act of their removal, was a great relief to Nero, who heaped rewards on Tigellinus. These events cemented Tigellinus and the emperor’s relationship and increased the distance between Faenius Rufus and Nero, as Tigellinus had hoped. By early AD 64, Tigellinus’ power was increasing with each passing week.
That power was both financial and political. Nero had made Tigellinus a wealthy man with his gifts and rewards. One of those rewards was, apparently, either the entire Basilica Aemilia, or the basilica’s portico fronting the Forum, which contained a number of shops. This massive building, 330 feet long and 100 feet wide, with two floors supported by columns and massive arches and topped by a third, attic floor, was one of Rome’s major retailing precincts, the shopping mall of its day. At the intersection of the Via Sacra (Sacred Way) and the Argiletum, itself a street known for its cobblers’ shops and booksellers at this time and fronting the Forum Romanum—the Fifth Avenue of ancient Rome—these Aemilian shops occupied prime retail real estate.
Five centuries earlier, there had been butchers’ shops here. A century later, bankers had taken over the site. After a subsequent fire, the shops were renovated and became known as the
tabernae nova
, or new shops. In 179 BC, work began here on a basilica that was completed by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. The Aemilian family had added to the building down through the decades. In 55 BC, a new, grander building, the one that now stood in AD 64, was erected on the site by Lucius Aemilius Pailus.
tabernae nova
, or new shops. In 179 BC, work began here on a basilica that was completed by Marcus Aemilius Lepidus. The Aemilian family had added to the building down through the decades. In 55 BC, a new, grander building, the one that now stood in AD 64, was erected on the site by Lucius Aemilius Pailus.
Early in the imperial era, the building had come into the possession of the imperial family. After another fire, in AD 14, the emperor Augustus had it restored. Another renovation eight years later was at the expense of Marcus Lepidus, of the Aemilian family. And now, the structure, or part of it, was Tigellinus’ property. Indoors, rows of marble-floored shops lined a central nave. The basilica’s restored portico, fronting the Forum, was similarly lined with shops and was dedicated by Augustus to his grandsons Gaius and Lucius.
Considered by some the most beautiful building in Rome, the Basilica Aemilia was certainly one of the most profitable, with the shops returning prime rents. To the Basilica Aemilia hurried slaves and freedmen each morning to shop on behalf of their masters and mistresses who lived in the mansions on the nearby Palatine, Capitoline, Caelian, and Aventine hills.
By a 59 BC edict of Julius Caesar, most wheeled traffic was banned from Rome’s narrow streets during daylight. So, it was in the night that merchants’ heavy four-wheeled wagons and farmers’ two-wheeled carts streamed into the city from the outskirts and the Tiber River docks, laden with both manufactured goods and produce, fish and livestock. And dodging around them would be the carriages and litters of the “night livers,” and parties of revelers out on the town, eating, drinking, and whoring. Rome was the original city that never slept. Provincials coming to Rome for the first time would complain that they could not sleep for the din that filled the city from dusk till dawn.
The Basilica Aemilia was not the city’s only shopping center. Rome possessed markets dedicated to the sale of livestock, produce, wine, clothing, footwear, and even markets specializing in the sale of herbs and flowers. Meanwhile, every winding street of old Rome was lined with businesses. Once their tall shutters were pushed back, all shops were open to the street, and a passerby could see the freedmen shopkeepers, their families, and their slave employees hard at work. Many shopkeepers slept on the premises, in cramped lofts above the store, with their families. In the ruins of Pompeii and Ostia today, a visitor might see four or five steps at the rear of typical Roman shops, leading nowhere. In Roman times, there would have been wooden ladders at the top of these steps, extending up to the lofts above the shops.
Countless grimy workshops operated in back streets: tanners and leather workers, with the smell of ammonia thick in the air; carpentry shops; iron foundries, with slaves toiling over hot, smoky forges. Brothels, which were legal in Rome, were usually in the back streets. Some taverns offered prostitutes on the second floor, as their wooden signs decorated with erect phalluses advertised. Brothels, called houses of seduction by some Romans and disorderly houses by others, only operated by night. Many fronted the street. A description exists of a first-century Roman brothel that had a quilt hanging in the doorway, to dampen noise but encourage entry. Inside, where customers and naked prostitutes nonchalantly roamed about, the premises were divided by wooden partitions into small bed cubicles, with a sign outside each chamber naming the prostitute working inside.
Surviving reliefs depicting shops at Rome show a butcher wielding a meat cleaver while various cuts of meat hang behind him; a green-grocer pointing out his fresh produce; a knife seller with his vast array of knives; and a pharmacist prescribing medicine for a patient, while an assistant pounds a pestle in a bowl. Another relief shows a store with fowl hanging by their feet; a woman hands fruit to a slave; wild birds occupy a closed wicker basket; cages contain live rabbits; a pair of chained monkeys sit forlornly on a counter. Wine bars occupied many city corners. More substantial taverns were also prevalent. Wine flagons were chained to columns outside, as advertisements. Large clay amphorae at the rear of the tavern were full of imported wine. When they were empty, these elegant amphorae, which look like giant cigars to modern eyes, were frequently smashed; there was no market for secondhand amphorae.
Hot-food establishments sent tantalizing aromas wafting on the air. Rome’s bakeries and pastry shops offered everything from the standard Roman loaf—round, like a pie, and sliced the same way—to tempting pastry delicacies. In Pompeii, one of the towns that would be buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 and which had a population of roughly twenty thousand, more than one hundred wine bars, twenty taverns, and forty bakeries have been identified. Multiply these numbers by at least fifty for Rome, whose first-century population exceeded a million people.
In Rome, as elsewhere in the Roman world, shopkeepers displayed their goods outside their doors. Hairdressers and barbers sat their customers on stools on the pavement, working on them with razor and knife in full public gaze while exchanging gossip. A poet of the time would complain that Rome was one vast shop. The open doors of Rome’s small, street-side schools revealed young students on stools, reciting the Twelve Tables, Rome’s basic laws, or verses from Homer or Virgil. One of the students in one of the better schools, this winter of AD 64, was the nine-year-old Publius Cornelius Tacitus, the future historian.
Bankers, scribes, and up-market stores occupied the Basilica Aemilia: the best jewelers; importers of ridiculously expensive food delicacies; purveyors of the finest wines, including Italy’s prized Falernian vintages. The brightly colored imported fabrics, particularly silks, of fabric merchants attracted Rome’s wealthy ladies. A relief shows one such fabric store, with rich cushions hanging from the ceiling. Two staff members unravel a roll of cloth for several seated female customers. Fashion and fad drove the shopping impulses in Roman times, just as much as they do today. After he had ceased to be a man of power and of extravagance, Seneca wrote to a friend: “Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them or because they’re in most people’s houses.”
12
12
All this shopping activity generated a hubbub that meant a visitor approaching Rome on the morning of any business day would hear the city before seeing it. The visitor might also see or smell evidence of it on the wind; according to Seneca, the air of Rome reeked of smoke and poisonous fumes from all the cookers of the metropolis, and ashes commonly floated on the breeze from the same source.
13
Here was Horace’s famous “smoke, splendor and noise of the city,” in this the commercial heart of the empire.
14
Tigellinus the Praetorian prefect had a tidy share of that commerce, but he would always be looking for more profit, more rewards, more real estate.
13
Here was Horace’s famous “smoke, splendor and noise of the city,” in this the commercial heart of the empire.
14
Tigellinus the Praetorian prefect had a tidy share of that commerce, but he would always be looking for more profit, more rewards, more real estate.
Greed was the driving force of Rome. More than one landlord of the city’s forty-seven thousand
insulae
, or apartment blocks, had been guilty of setting fire to their own properties in the past. Not for insurance money; insurance was one innovation that escaped the otherwise business-savvy Romans. Landlords would then hastily build larger buildings on the ruined sites, providing smaller rooms and demanding larger rents. The landlords’ profit in such instances was a long time coming. Tigellinus was interested in more immediate rewards.
insulae
, or apartment blocks, had been guilty of setting fire to their own properties in the past. Not for insurance money; insurance was one innovation that escaped the otherwise business-savvy Romans. Landlords would then hastily build larger buildings on the ruined sites, providing smaller rooms and demanding larger rents. The landlords’ profit in such instances was a long time coming. Tigellinus was interested in more immediate rewards.
III
THE POETS
M
arcus Valerius Martialus, or Martial, as later generations would come to know him, rose before dawn as usual this winter morning. From his small apartment, three floors up in a nondescript apartment block sandwiched between countless others on Rome’s Quirinal Hill, where once Cicero’s good friend and correspondent Atticus had lived, and girding his cheap cloak around him, Martial made his way across the city though crowded, darkened streets to the house of Annaeus Mela, one of Rome’s wealthiest men.
arcus Valerius Martialus, or Martial, as later generations would come to know him, rose before dawn as usual this winter morning. From his small apartment, three floors up in a nondescript apartment block sandwiched between countless others on Rome’s Quirinal Hill, where once Cicero’s good friend and correspondent Atticus had lived, and girding his cheap cloak around him, Martial made his way across the city though crowded, darkened streets to the house of Annaeus Mela, one of Rome’s wealthiest men.
In his twenties, Martial had been born at Bilbilis in Spain. Although he boasted Celtic blood, Martial was a Roman citizen and the son of a Roman citizen. His parents had given him a good education, including tutoring in grammar and rhetoric. When Seneca was still Nero’s chief secretary, the young Martial had come to Rome seeking to make his fortune. Martial rated earning above learning. “My parents were stupid enough to have me taught literature, a paltry subject,” he would say, years later. “But what good were teachers of grammar and rhetoric to me?”
1
He had arrived from Spain with an introduction to Seneca, a fellow Spaniard. Their shared heritage paid dividends: The rich and hugely powerful chief secretary had taken Martial on as one of his many clients.
1
He had arrived from Spain with an introduction to Seneca, a fellow Spaniard. Their shared heritage paid dividends: The rich and hugely powerful chief secretary had taken Martial on as one of his many clients.
This promising start to Martial’s career soon hit a major obstacle. Seneca retired from office not long after Martial arrived at Rome. Determined to melt into obscurity so as not to antagonize Nero, Seneca had divorced himself of most of his clients. Cast aside were men such as the wealthy and very social Gaius Piso, the noted author Fabius Rusticus, who, through Seneca’s patronage, had risen to fame, and complete unknowns such as Martial. Only Seneca’s physician, his in-laws, and one or two other useful people remained in the former chief secretary’s now very limited circle. In divesting himself of clients, Seneca had passed Martial on to his younger brother Mela.
Mela had amassed an immense fortune as an astute businessman, but he did not mix in the same circles as Seneca, kept a low public profile, and had little or no political influence. Mela easily met the financial qualification for elevation to the Senatorial Order from the Equestrian Order—a personal net worth of 1.2 million sesterces. But Mela preferred to remain an Equestrian and keep well away from the Senate and from politics. He concentrated on making money. To Mela’s mind, an Equestrian was the equal of even a former consul. So good was Mela at making money that after an introduction from Seneca, he had even been employed by the emperor to manage some of his private business affairs.
Martial was ushered into Mela’s reception room. Numerous fellow clients milled about the room; they were here, like Martial, for the morning’s levee with their patron. Some were of Equestrian rank; some were freedmen, former slaves. All had come to pay their respects to Mela, their patron. This was how the Roman social system worked. The only free man at Rome who did not have a patron or need one was the emperor.
As the system prescribed, Martial had several patrons, and after he departed Mela’s house, he would hurry to the homes of other patrons and play the good client. Petilius, another of Martial’s rich patrons, possessed, in addition to a city house, a regal country estate on the Janiculum, today’s Gianicolo, a hill that overlooks Rome from the left bank of the Tiber. Julius Caesar had kept an estate and a villa on the Janiculum; Cleopatra had famously stayed in that villa when she came to Rome. Petilius’ Janiculum estate boasted one of the finest vineyards in Italy; its product rivaled Falernian wine, the benchmark of fine Roman wine.
BOOK: The Great Fire of Rome: The Fall of the Emperor Nero and His City
3.16Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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