The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (41 page)

An inscription has survived communicating the Senate’s decision on the cult to communities across the peninsula. It ordered:

No man is to be a priest; no one, either man or woman, is to be an officer (to manage the temporal affairs of the organization); nor is anyone of them to have charge of a common treasury; no one shall appoint either man or woman to be master or to act as master; henceforth they shall not form conspiracies among themselves, stir up any disorder, make mutual promises or agreements, or exchange pledges.

Care was taken not to offend the god needlessly. Bacchic rituals could still be performed, but only with official permission and in the presence of no more than five people.

As for the lovers, they were handsomely rewarded. Aebutius was forgiven his military service and Hispala was allowed to marry a freeborn Roman, and, it was decreed, “
no slur or disgrace on account of the marriage should attach to the man who married her.” History does not relate what happened to them next.

With this permission granted, the couple were entitled to become husband and wife, in theory. But the boy was young and, like many who have their first sexual experience with a knowledgeable and kindly older woman, he probably moved on. After all, he and his girlfriend were from radically different social classes. Whatever the Senate said, prejudice against former slaves and prostitutes was fierce. The integrity of the family line had to be protected at all costs.

We may hope for, but doubt, a happy ending.

THE REAL IMPORTANCE
of the scandal was the light it threw on Rome’s contradictory attitudes toward Greece. From the Republic’s earliest years, the Hellenic world had been a major influence, but now that they were emerging as the dominant Mediterranean state, Romans were coming into direct contact with this culture for the first time. They admired the deathless achievements of a glorious past—the works of the great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles,
and Euripides; the philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; the sculpture of Pheidias; the architecture of Ictinus and so forth—and knew they could not compete with them.

The decadent descendants of these great men looked down their noses on the provincial newcomers from Italy. They “
would jeer at their habits and customs, others at Roman achievements, others at the appearance of the city itself, which was not yet beautified in either its public places or private districts.” For his part, the average Roman harbored a healthy distrust of contemporary Greeks (they were the classical equivalent of cheese-eating surrender monkeys). Livy makes this clear when, with a sneer, he attributes the Bacchanalia as a “
method of infecting people’s minds with error” to a “Greek of humble origin, a man possessed of none of those numerous accomplishments which the Greek people, the most highly educated and civilized of nations, has introduced among us for the cultivation of mind and body.”

While the Senate disliked and discouraged foreign cults from the Orient, it was by no means consistent in practice. In 293, an outbreak of plague led to a consultation of the Sibylline Books and the importation from Epidaurus, in Greece, of a snake sacred to the god of medicine, Asklepios (Latinized into Aesculapius), for whom a shrine and a healing center were built on Tiber Island. In 206, a prophecy was discovered which stated that if ever a foreign enemy were to invade Italy he would be driven out only if Cybele, or the Great Mother, was brought to Rome (in the shape of a holy black stone).

Desperate to see an end to Hannibal’s occupation of the peninsula, the goddess was welcomed into the city and a new temple was built for her on the Palatine. Cybele and her youthful consort, Attis, expressed the annual cycle of the fertility of the land in a manner that a Roman traditionalist would find distinctly unappealing. Her spring festivities, during which self-castrated eunuchs danced to cymbals and drums, were no less exotic than those dedicated
to Dionysus. Attis had set the precedent. As the first-century poet Catullus writes, he,

moved by madness,

bemused in his mind, Lopped off the load of his loins with a sharp flint.

Woman now, and aware of her wasted manhood,

Still bleeding, the blood bedaubing the ground still,

With feminine fingers she fetched the light drum

That makes the music, Great Mother, at your mysteries.

This was all most un-Roman, and care was taken to limit the impact of the new cult. The goddess’s priests were and remained foreigners, and their numbers and activities were strictly limited.

Meanwhile, the ruling élite maintained, with its usual attention to detail, the superstitious, placatory rituals of Rome’s official religion. Change was unwelcome, and loyalty to the
mos maiorum
was essential to the Republic’s well-being. This was sometimes taken to absurd lengths. One example may speak for all. Every year the senior outgoing consul proclaimed his successors in office. In 163, the officeholder of the day, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, conducted the ceremony as usual. But after the new magistrates had taken command in their respective spheres of activity Gracchus came across an ancient book of religious practices, in which he found a regulation he knew nothing about. Plutarch explains it:

Whenever a magistrate, sitting in a hired house or tent outside the city to take auspices from the flight of birds, is compelled for any reason to return to the city before sure signs have appeared, he must give up the house first hired and take another, and from this he must take his observations anew.

Tiberius had innocently twice used the same house for his observations before making his consular proclamations. Horrified, he referred
the matter to the Senate, which recalled the consuls and made them resign their offices. They were then reappointed after the liturgy had been repeated in proper form.

The
mos maiorum
received its symbolic incarnation in the funerals of noblemen. The corpse was carried into the Forum and displayed in an upright position, as if the dead man were still alive, on the Rostra. His son or some other relative delivered a eulogy, listing the facts of his career, as both a history lesson and an assertion of Republican virtue. Polybius, the observant foreigner who spent much of a lifetime observing Romans, describes the most extraordinary aspect of the ceremony. He reports that an image of the deceased was present alongside those of his famous forebears and, after the burial, was put on permanent show in a wooden shrine in his house:

The image consists of a mask, which is fashioned with extraordinary fidelity both in its modeling and its complexion to represent the features of the dead man.… And when any distinguished member of the family dies, the masks [of his predecessors] are taken to the funeral, and are there worn by men who are considered to bear the closest resemblance to the original, both in height and in their general appearance and bearing. These substitutes [they were usually family members] are dressed according to the rank of the deceased: a toga with a purple border for a consul or praetor, a completely purple garment for a censor, and one embroidered with gold for a man who had celebrated a triumph or performed some similar exploit. They all ride in chariots with the fasces, axes, and other insignia carried before them … and when they arrive at the Rostra they all seat themselves in a row upon chairs of ivory.

What a spectacle this must have been. The dead had reawakened—perhaps they had never fallen asleep—and were now listening attentively
to the life story of their freshly deceased posterity. Today’s generation could see, with all the sharpened focus of a waking dream, that it was on trial before its ancestors.

THERE WERE OTHER
ways in the city of Rome by which the sanctified past kept company with the present. On every corner were shrines, temples, and holy groves, sacred to one divinity or another. Temples were storehouses of old trophies, bronze tablets with the texts of laws and treaties, votive offerings, and other obsolete odds and ends. In the Forum and elsewhere, paintings of famous military exploits, originally made for triumphs, were on display. Masterpieces of Greek art, captured in the sack of such cities as Syracuse and Tarentum, transformed Rome into an open-air museum. Here was a treasury of clutter, awaiting the explanations of both the historian and the antiquarian, although these were often inaccurate or imaginative.

On the Sacred Way, Romulus and his Sabine counterpart, Titus Tatius, kept watch, in sculptural form, over the Forum below. In the middle of the square itself, the fig tree beneath which the founding brothers were suckled by the she-wolf still flourished. Nearby was a pool, now dried up, called the Lacus Curtius. Here a chasm had once split open; it was said that it would never close until Rome’s most valued possession had been deposited in it. Gold and jewelry were thrown in, to no effect. At last, a young cavalryman realized that the answer to the riddle was the Roman soldier. He galloped into the abyss and the earth closed above his head.

Not far away, next to the Temple of Castor, with its lofty podium, was the spring of Iuturna, where the divine twins watered their horses after the Battle of Lake Regillus. At the other end of the Forum was the speakers’ platform, the Rostra. Orators addressing the populace had to compete for attention with a throng of half-life-size statues of ambassadors who had perished while on missions for the state.

The hill of the Capitol was also littered with statues of famous Romans, kings, and that expeller of the kings, Marcus Brutus. Among them stood two colossi of the hero Hercules and another of Jupiter himself, erected in the fourth century. There were so many representations of the great men of old that visitors must have had the eerie impression that they were walking through a crowd turned into stone by some passing Medusa.

Subterranean chambers beneath the temple of Jupiter Best and Greatest were packed not only with old dedications but also with sculptures that had fallen from the temple roof and a variety of superfluous gifts. Walls were covered with bronze tablets on which the terms of treaties and the texts of laws were inscribed. Victory trophies and votive monuments occupied every spare corner.

OF COURSE, ROME
was more than a space for memory, a cemetery field of relics; it was also a living city, expanding all the time and well on its way to becoming an early megalopolis. The Forum was the city’s center, part shopping center, part law courts, and part political arena. Human life in all its variety pushed its way up among the statues, the shrines, the temples.

We are lucky to have a direct account of daily life from someone who lived and thrived in Rome during and after the wars with Carthage. He was the comedy playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. In one of his pieces, a character conducts
a tour of the Forum, a locale where the best and worst of human nature can be found. “
From virtue down to trash,” he says, “here is god’s plenty.” The lower or southern part of the piazza was the preserve of the respectable or, in Plautus’s words, “the good men and the opulent.” He comments, “For perjurers, you can apply to the courts of law,” which were held in the open air near the circular Comitium, where public assemblies were convened (
there was room, at a squeeze, for perhaps five thousand citizens to attend and for ten thousand in the Forum as a whole). Liars and dishonest salesmen congregated at the little
shrine of Venus Cloacina, or Venus of the Drain. A statue of Venus was said once to have fallen into the open drain here, hence her cognomen. The shrine was a low circular platform with two statues of the goddess, a pleasant enough place to loiter.

“Rich and errant husbands” frequented the Basilica, a business hall where bankers set up their tables and entrepreneurs sold shares in enterprises. Across the square a line of retail outlets, the
tabernae veteres
, or Old Shops, was largely peopled with moneylenders, and behind the Temple of Castor and Pollux “conmen extract loans from the unwary.” Near the Vicus Tuscus (Etruscan Street), was the rent boys’ cruising ground. The street led to the Velabrum, a saddle of land between the Palatine and Capitoline hills, where “you’ll find bakers, butchers and fortune-tellers.”

Unlike Alexandria, the gleaming white, checkered capital of the Ptolemies, Rome was unplanned. Buildings grew up ad hoc along ancient pathways that led to the Palatine and Capitoline hills, until the city became a maze of gloomy, narrow alleys and little squares. The principles of hygiene were little understood and infectious diseases were rife. Some (not altogether successful) efforts were made to collect sewage for use as agricultural fertilizer, and it was recognized that a copious supply of clean water was essential. Two aqueducts, mainly running underground, were built in 312 (by Appius Claudius Caecus, see
this page
) and in 272. By the middle of the second century, a rising population had led to the construction of the Aqua Marcia, an astonishing feat of engineering that brought water to the top of the Capitol. Few people could afford baths at home, and by about 100 public baths had become a universal feature of daily life.

Most thoroughfares in the city were unpaved, although they might have raised sidewalks; people dumped rubbish and sewage in them, as well as dead animals and the occasional unwanted corpse. Slops from pots often fell on the heads of unwary passersby (Laws were passed regulating claims for damages.) Unsanitary conditions
were not the only danger, for wheeled traffic took up much of the available space and accidents were common.