II. THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST…

II. THE WORLD OF THE SATIRIST

Juvenal and Tacitus, although they moved in different circles and probably never met, have much in common. Both were released from an ignominious silence by the death of Domitian. Both were then at the age which combines the ripeness of experience and reflection with a fire and energy still unflagging.(344) They were, from different causes, both filled with hatred and disgust for the vices of their time, and their experience had engendered in both a pessimism which darkened their faith. Tacitus belonged to the senatorial order who had held high office, and had seen its ranks decimated and its dignity outraged under the tyranny. Juvenal sprang from the lower middle class, which hated alike the degenerate noble and the insolent parvenu far more than it hated even a Domitian. Yet both Juvenal and Tacitus are united in a passionate admiration for the old Roman character. Their standards and ideals are drawn from the half-mythical ages of the simple warriors and farmer-statesmen of the old Republic. And their estimate of their time needs to be scrutinised in the light both of their hatreds and of their ideals.

The life of Juvenal is wrapt in obscurity, although nine lives of him are extant.(345) Scholars are still at variance as to the date of his birth, the date of many of his satires, and especially as to the time and circumstances of his banishment, about which there is so uniform a tradition. But, for our purpose, some facts are clear enough. Juvenal was the son of a well-to-do freedman of Aquinum, and rose to the highest magisterial office in his native town at some time of his career.(346) He carefully hides his personal history from us; but we might gather from his Satires that he belonged to the lower middle class,(347) that he was in temper and tone an old plebeian of the times of the Republic, although vividly touched by the ideas of a new morality which had been afloat for more than two generations. But, like Tacitus, he has little sympathy with the great philosophic movement which was working a silent revolution. He had the rhetorical training of the time, with all its advantages and its defects. And he is more a rhetorician than a poet. We can well believe the report that his early literary enthusiasm found vent in declamation on those mythical or frivolous themes which exercised the youth in the Roman schools for many centuries. Although he was hardly a poor man(348) in the sense in which Martial, his friend, was poor, yet he had stooped to bear the ignominy and hardships of client dependence. He had hurried in rain and storm in the early morning to receptions at great houses on the Esquiline, through the squalor and noises and congested traffic of the Suburra.(349) He had doubtless often been a guest at those “unequal dinners,” where the host, who was himself regaled with far-fetched dainties and old crusted Alban or Setine wine, insulted his poorer friends by offering them the cheapest vintage and the meanest fare.(350) He had been compelled, as a matter of social duty, to sit through the recitation of those ambitious and empty Theseids and Thebaids, with which the rich amateur in literature in those days afflicted his long-suffering friends.(351) He may have been often elbowed aside by some supple, clever Greek, with versatile accomplishments and infinite audacity. He may have been patronised or insulted by a millionaire parvenu, like the Trimalchio of Petronius, tainted with the memories of a shameful servitude. He saw new vulgar wealth everywhere triumphant, while the stiff, yet, in many ways, wholesome conventionality of old Roman life was defied and trampled upon by an aggressive vulgarity. In such a world there was little room for the man whose wealth is in his genius, and who clings to the traditions of ages which believed that men had a soul as well as a body. A man like Juvenal, living in such a society, almost necessarily becomes embittered. Like Johnson, in his Grub Street days, he will have his hours when bitterness passes into self-abandonment, and he will sound the depths of that world of corruption which in his better moods he loathes. Some of the associates of Juvenal were of very doubtful position, and more than doubtful morals;(352) and the warmth of some of his realistic painting of dark sides of Roman life arouses the suspicion that he may have at times forgotten his moral ideal. He certainly knows the shameful secrets of Roman life almost as well as his friend Martial does. But his knowledge, however gained, was turned to a very different purpose from that which inspired Martial’s brilliant prurience.(353)

The Satires of Juvenal were probably not given to the world till after the death of Domitian.(354) The date of the earliest is about 100 A.D., that of the latest probably 127. Juvenal cautiously disguises his attacks on his own time. He whets his sword against the sinners whose ashes have long reposed beside the Flaminian and the Latin ways.(355) Very few of his contemporaries appear in his pages,(356) and the scenery is often that of the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, or Nero. But his deepest and most vivid impressions must have come to Juvenal in that period which has been photographed with such minute exactness by Martial. And there is a striking correspondence between the two writers, not only in many of the characters whom they introduce, but in their pictures of the whole state of morals and letters.(357) They both detested that frigid epic which laboriously ploughed the sands of conventional legend, and they turned with weariness from the old-world tales of Thebes or Argos to the real tragedy or comedy of Roman life around them. Although they were friends and companions, it is needless to assume any close partnership in their studies. Starting with the same literary impulse, they deal to a large extent with the same vices and follies, some of them peculiar to their own age, others common to all ages of Rome, or even of the world of civilisation. A long list might easily be compiled of their common stock of subjects, and their common antipathies. In both writers we meet the same grumbling of the needy client against insolent or niggardly patrons, the complaints of the struggling man of letters about the extravagant rewards of low vulgar impostors. Both are bored to death, like the patient Pliny, by the readings of wealthy scribblers, or by tiresome pleadings in the courts, measured by many a turn of the clepsydra. They feel an equal disgust for the noise and squalor of the narrow streets, an equal love for the peace and freshness and rough plenty of the country farm. In both may be seen the scions of great houses reduced to mendicancy, ambitious poverty betaking itself to every mean or disreputable device, the legacy-hunter courting the childless rich with flattery or vicious compliance. You will often encounter the sham philosopher, as you meet him sixty years afterwards in the pages of Lucian, with his loud talk of virtue and illustrious names, while his cloak covers all the vices of dog and ape. Both deal rather ungently with the character of women,—their intrigues with actors, gladiators, and slaves, their frequent divorces and rapid succession of husbands, their general abandonment of antique matronly reserve. Both have, in fact, with different motives, uncovered the secret shame of the ancient world; and, more even than by that shame, was their indignation moved by the great social revolution which was confusing all ranks, and raising old slaves, cobblers, and auctioneers to the benches of the knights.

Yet with this resemblance in the subjects of their choice, there is the widest difference between the two writers in their motive and mode of treatment. Martial, of course, is not a moralist at all; the mere suggestion excites a smile. He is a keen and joyous observer of the faults and follies, the lights and shades, of a highly complex and artificial society which is “getting over-ripe.” In the power of mere objective description and minute portraiture of social life, Martial is almost unique. Through his verses, we know the society of Domitian as we know hardly any other period of ancient society. But this very vividness and truthfulness is chiefly due to the fact that Martial was almost without a conscience. He was indeed personally, perhaps, not so bad as he is often painted.(358) He knows and can appreciate a good woman;(359) he can love, with the simplest, unsophisticated love, an innocent slave-child, the poor little Erotion,(360) whom he has immortalised. He can honour a simple manly character, free from guile and pretence.(361) He has a genuine, exuberant love of the fresh joys of country life, sharpened, no doubt, by the experience of the client’s sordid slavery, amid the mingled poverty and lavish splendour of the capital.(362) Where could one find a fresher, prettier idyll than his picture of the farm of Faustinus, with its packed granaries, and its cellars fragrant with the juice of many an old autumn vintage, the peacock spreading his jewelled plumage, and the ring-dove cooing overhead from the towers? The elegant slaves of the great house in the city are having a holiday, and busy, under the bailiff’s care, with rural toils, or fishing in the stream. The tall daughters of the neighbouring cottages bring in their well-stocked baskets to the villa, and all gather joyously at evening to a plenteous meal.(363) Martial has, moreover, one great virtue, which is a powerful antidote for many moral faults, the love of the far-off home of his childhood, the rugged Bilbilis, with its iron foundries near the sources of the Tagus, to which he retreated from the crush and din of plebeian life at Rome, and where he rests.(364) But when charity or justice has done its best for Martial, and no scholar will repudiate the debt, it still remains true that he represents, perhaps better than any other, that pagan world, naked and unabashed, and feels no breath of inspiration from the great spiritual movement which, in paganism itself, was setting towards an ideal of purity and self-conquest.

Juvenal, at least in his later work, reveals a moral standard and motive apparently unknown to Martial.(365) It may be admitted, indeed, that Juvenal did not always write under the same high impulse. He had the rhetorician’s love of fine, telling phrases, and startling effects. He had a rare gift of realistic painting, and he exults in using it. He has also burning within him an old plebeian pride which looked down at once on the degenerate son of an ancient house, and on the nouveaux riches, whose rise seemed to him the triumph of vulgar opulence without the restraint of traditions or ideals. Conscious of great talents, with a character almost fierce in its energy, he felt a burning hatred of a society which seemed to value only material success, or those supple and doubtful arts which could invent some fresh stimulus for exhausted appetite. In Juvenal a great silent, sunken class, whom we hardly know otherwise than from the inscriptions on their tombs,(366) finds for once a powerful voice and a terrible avenger. But, along with this note of personal or class feeling, there is in Juvenal a higher moral intuition, a vision of a higher life, which had floated before some Roman minds long before his time,(367) and which was destined to broaden into an accepted ideal. Juvenal, indeed, was no philosopher, and he had, like Tacitus, all the old Roman distrust of the theories of the schools.(368) He had probably little respect for such teaching as Seneca’s.(369) Yet in important points he and Seneca belong to the same order of the elect. Although, perhaps, a less spotless character than Tacitus, he is far more advanced and modern in his breadth of sympathy and moral feeling. He feels acutely for the conquered provinces which have been fleeced and despoiled of their wealth and artistic treasures, and which are still exposed to the peculation and cruelty of governors and their train.(370) He denounces, like Seneca, the contempt and cruelty often shown to slaves. The man whose ideal seems often to be drawn from the hard, stern warriors who crushed the Samnites and baffled the genius of Hannibal, in his old age has come to glorify pity and tenderness for suffering as the best gift of God, the gift that separates him most widely from the brute creation.(371) He preaches sympathy and mutual help, in an age torn by selfish individualist passions. He denounces the lust for revenge almost in the tones of a Christian preacher.(372) What heathen moralist has painted more vividly the horrors of the guilty conscience, that unseen inquisitor, with sterner more searching eyes than Rhadamanthus? Who has taught with greater power that the root of sin is in the evil thought?(373) Juvenal realises, like Tacitus and Quintilian, the curse of a tainted ancestry, and the incalculable importance of pure example in the education of youth.(374) He, who knew so well the awful secrets of Roman households, sets an immense value on the treasure of an untainted boyhood, like that of the ploughman’s son, who waits at Juvenal’s simple meal “and sighs for his mother, and the little cottage, and his playmates the kids.”(375) Observation of character had also taught him the fatal law that the downward path in conduct, once entered on, is seldom retraced. And this moral insight seems to come to Juvenal not from any consciously held philosophic doctrine, nor from a settled religious faith. His faith, like that of many of his time, was probably of the vaguest. He scorns and detests the Eastern worships which were pouring in like a flood, and carrying away even loose women of the world.(376) He pillories the venal star-reader from the East and the Jewish hag who interprets dreams. But he has also scant respect for classic mythologies, and regrets the simple, long-gone age, before heaven became crowded with divinities, before Saturn had exchanged the diadem for the sickle, when Juno was still a little maid,(377) when the terrors of Tartarus, the wheel, the vulture, and the lash of the Furies had not taken the place of a simple natural conscience.(378)

Juvenal’s moral tone then appears to unite the spirit of two different ages. In some of his later Satires you catch the accent of the age which was just opening when Juvenal began to write, its growing sense of the equality and brotherhood of man, its cosmopolitan morality, its ideals of spiritual culture. But there are other elements in Juvenal, derived from old Roman prejudice and conventionality, or the result of personal temperament and experience, which are quite as prominent. Juvenal is an utter pessimist about his time, more extreme even than Tacitus. His age, if we believe him, has attained the climax of corruption, and posterity will never improve upon its finished depravity.(379) His long practice as a declaimer had given him a habit of exaggeration, and of aiming rather at rhetorical brilliancy than truth. Whole passages in his poems read like declamatory exercises turned into verse.(380) A mere hanger-on of great society, one of the obscure crowd who flocked to the rich man’s levée, and knowing the life of the aristocracy only by remote observation or the voice of scandalous gossip, he hardly deserves the implicit trust which has been often accorded to his indictments of the society of his day. His generalisations are of the most sweeping kind; the colours are all dark. He thinks that the number of decent people in his day is infinitesimally small. And yet we may reasonably suspect, from his own evidence, that he often generalised from single cases, that he treated abnormal specimens as types. His moral ideals cannot have been a monopoly of his own. In the palace of Nero in the worst days, there was a pure Octavia as well as a voluptuous Poppaea. The wife and mother of the gross Vitellius were women of spotless fame.(381) And in reading the fierce, unmeasured declamation of Juvenal, we should never forget that he knew nothing personally of Pliny or Tacitus, or of the circle which surrounded Verginius Rufus and Spurinna. He has the same pessimist theory of human declension which was held by Seneca and by Tacitus. Every form of crime and sensuality has been rampant since Rome lost the treasure of poverty, since the days when silver shone only on the Roman’s arms.(382) Juvenal’s ideal lies in that mythical past when a Curius, thrice consul, strode homeward from the hills, mattock on shoulder, to a meal of home-grown herbs and bacon served on earthenware.(383) It is the luxury of the conquered lands which has relaxed the Roman fibre, which has introduced a false standard of life, degraded great houses, and flooded the city with an alien crew of astrologers and grammarians, parasites and pimps.

Modern criticism has laboured hard to correct some of the harsher judgments on the luxury and self-indulgence of the period of the early Empire. Perhaps the scholarly reaction against an indictment which had degenerated sometimes into ignorant commonplace, may have been carried here and there too far. The testimony of Tacitus is explicit that the luxury of the table reached its height in the hundred years extending from the battle of Actium to the accession of Vespasian.(384) It was a period of enormous fortunes spent in enormous waste. Seneca or Pallas or Narcissus had accumulated wealth probably three or four times greater than even the fortune of a Crassus or a Lucullus. The long peace, the safety of the seas, and the freedom of trade, had made Rome the entrepôt for the peculiar products and the delicacies of every land from the British Channel to the Ganges. The costly variety of these foreign dainties was vulgarly paraded at every great dinner-party. Palaces, extending almost over the area of a town, were adorned with marbles from the quarries of Paros, Laconia, Phrygia, or Numidia,(385) with gilded ceilings and curious panels changing with the courses of the banquet,(386) with hundreds of tables of citrus-wood, resting on pillars of ivory, each costing a moderate fortune, with priceless bronzes and masterpieces of ancient plate. Nearly a million each year was drained away to the remoter East, to purchase aromatics and jewels for the elaborate toilette of the Roman lady.(387) Hundreds of household slaves, each with his minute special function, anticipated every want, or ministered to every passion of their masters. Every picturesque or sheltered site on the great lakes, on the Anio, or the Alban hills, in the Laurentine pine forests, or on the bays of Campania, was occupied by far-spreading country seats. Lavish expenditure and luxurious state was an imperious duty of rank, even without the precept of an emperor.(388) The senator who paid too low a rent, or rode along the Appian or Flaminian Way with too scanty a train, became a marked man, and immediately lost caste.(389) These are the merest commonplace of the social history of the time.

Yet in spite of the admitted facts of profusion and self-indulgence, we may decline to accept Juvenal’s view of the luxury of the age without some reserve. It is indeed no apology for the sensuality of a section of the Roman aristocracy in that day, to point out that the very same excesses made their appearance two centuries before him, and that they will be lamented both by Pagan and Christian moralists three centuries after his death. But these facts suggest a doubt whether the cancer of luxury had struck so deep as satirists thought into the vitals of a society which remained for so many centuries erect and strong. Before the end of the third century B.C., began the long series of sumptuary laws which Tiberius treated as so futile.(390) The elder Pliny and Livy date the introduction of luxurious furniture from the return of the army in 188 B.C., after the campaign in Asia.(391) Crassus, who left, after the most prodigal expenditure, a fortune of £1,700,000, had a town house which cost over £60,000.(392) The lavish banquets of Lucullus were proverbial, and his villa at Misenum was valued at £24,000. It was an age when more than £1000 was given for a slave-cook or a pair of silver cups.(393) Macrobius has preserved the menu of a pontifical banquet, at which Julius Caesar and the Vestals were present, and which in its costly variety surpassed, as he says, any epicurism of the reign of Honorius.(394) And yet Ammianus and S. Jerome level very much the same charges against the nobles of the fourth century,(395) which satire makes against the nobles of the first. When we hear the same anathemas of luxury in the days of Lucullus and in the reign of Honorius, separated by an interval of more than five centuries, in which the Roman race stamped itself on the page of history and on the face of nature by the most splendid achievements of military virtue and of civilising energy, we are inclined to question either the report of our authorities, or the satirist’s interpretation of the social facts.

The good faith of the elder Pliny, of Seneca and Juvenal, need not, indeed, be called in question. But the first two were men who led by preference an almost ascetic life. The satirist was a man whose culinary tastes were satisfied by the kid and eggs and asparagus of his little farm at Tibur.(396) And the simple abstemious habits of the south, which are largely the result of climate, tended to throw into more startling contrast any indulgence of superfluous appetite. It is true that the conquests which unlocked the hoarded treasures of eastern monarchies, gave a great shock to the hardy frugality and self-restraint of the old Roman character, just as the stern simplicity of Spartan breeding was imperilled by contact with the laxer life of the Hellespontine towns and the wealth of the Persian court.(397) The Roman aristocracy were for two centuries exposed to the same temptations as the treasures of the Incas offered to Pizarro,(398) or the treasures of the Moguls to Clive. In the wild licence, which prevailed in certain circles for more than a century, many a fortune and many a character were wrecked. Yet the result may easily be exaggerated. Extravagant luxury and self-indulgence is at all times only possible to a comparatively small number. And luxury, after all, is a relative term. The luxuries of one age often become the necessities of the next. There are many articles of food or dress, which free-trade and science have brought to the doors of our cottagers, which would have incurred the censure of the elder Pliny or of Seneca. There are aldermanic banquets in New York or the city of London in our own day, which far surpass, in costliness and variety, the banquets of Lucullus or the pontiff’s feast described by Macrobius. The wealth of Pallas, Narcissus, or Seneca, was only a fraction of many a fortune accumulated in the last thirty years in the United States.(399) The exaggerated idea of Roman riches and waste has been further heightened by the colossal extravagance of the worst emperors and a few of their boon companions and imitators. But we are apt to forget that these were the outbreaks of morbid and eccentric character, in which the last feeble restraints were sapped and swept away by the sense of having at command the resources of a world. Nero is expressly described by the historian as a lover of the impossible;(400) and both he and Caligula had floating before their disordered imaginations the dream of astounding triumphs, even over the most defiant forces and barriers of nature. There was much in the extravagance of their courtiers and imitators, springing from the same love of sensation and display. Rome was a city of gossip, and the ambition to be talked about, as the inventor of some new freak of prodigality, was probably the only ambition of the blasé spendthrift of the time.

Yet, after all the deductions of scrupulous criticism, the profound moral sense of Juvenal has laid bare and painted with a realistic power, hardly equalled even by Tacitus, an unhealthy temper in the upper classes, which was full of peril. He has also revealed, alongside of this decline, a great social change, we may even call it a crisis, which the historian, generally more occupied with the great figures on the stage, is apt to ignore. The decay in the morale and wealth of the senatorial order, together with the growing power of a new moneyed class, the rise to opulence of the freedman and the petty trader, the invasion of Greek and Oriental influences, and the perilous or hopeful emancipation, especially of women, from old Roman conventionality, these are the great facts in the social history of the first century which, under all his rhetoric, stand out clearly to the eye of the careful student of the satirist.

The famous piece, in which Juvenal describes an effeminate Fabius or Lepidus, before the mutilated statues and smoke-stained pedigree of his house, rattling the dice-box till the dawn, or sunk in the stupor of debauch at the hour when his ancestors were sounding their trumpets for the march,(401) has, for eighteen centuries, inspired many a homily on the vanity of mere birth. Its moral is now a hackneyed one. But, when the piece was written, it must have been a powerful indictment. For the respect for long descent was still deep in the true Roman, and was gratified by fabulous genealogies to the end. Pliny extols Trajan for reserving for youths of illustrious birth the honours due to their race.(402) Suetonius recounts the twenty-eight consulships, five dictatorships, seven censorships, and many triumphs which were the glory of the great Claudian house,(403) and the similar honours which had been borne by the paternal ancestors of Nero.(404) Tacitus, although not himself a man of old family, has a profound belief in noble tradition, and sometimes speaks with an undisguised scorn of a low alliance.(405) As the number of the “Trojugenae” dwindled, the pride of the vanishing remnant probably grew in proportion, and a clan like the Calpurnian reluctantly yielded precedence even to Tiberius or Nero.(406) It is a sign of the social tone that the manufacture of genealogies for the new men, who came into prominence from the reign of Vespasian, went on apace. A Trojan citizen in the days of Apollonius traced himself to Priam.(407) Herodes Atticus claimed descent from the heroes of Aegina,(408) just as some of the Christian friends of S. Jerome confidently carried their pedigree back to Aeneas or Agamemnon.(409) Juvenal would certainly not have accepted such fables, but he was no leveller. He had a firm belief in moral heredity and the value of tradition. Plebeian as he was, he had, like Martial, his own old Roman pride, which poured contempt on the upstarts who, with the stains of servile birth or base trade upon them, were crowding the benches of the knights. He would, indeed, have applauded the mot of Tiberius, that a distinguished man was his own ancestor;(410) he recalls with pride that one humble son of Arpinum had annihilated the hordes of the Cimbri, and another had crushed the rising of Catiline.(411) But he had the true Roman reverence for the Curii, Fabii, and Scipios, and would gladly salute any of their descendants who reproduced their virtues.

It is a melancholy certainty that a great many of the senatorial class in Juvenal’s day had fallen very low in all things essential to the strength of a great caste. Their numbers had long been dwindling,(412) owing to vicious celibacy or the cruel proscriptions of the triumvirate and the four Claudian Caesars, or from the unwillingness or inability of many to support the burdens of their rank. It was a rare thing in many great houses to reach middle age.(413) Three hundred senators and two thousand knights had fallen in the proscription of the second triumvirate.(414) The massacre of old and young of both sexes, which followed the fall of Sejanus, must have extinguished many an ancient line; not a day passed without an execution.(415) Three hundred knights and thirty-five senators perished in the reign of Claudius.(416) Very few of the most ancient patrician houses were left when Claudius revised the lists of the Senate, and introduced a fresh element from Gaul.(417) Who can tell the numbers of those who fell victims to the rage or greed or suspicion of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian? The list must have been enormously swelled by the awful year of the four emperors. Vespasian found it necessary to recruit the ranks of the aristocracy from Italy and the provinces.(418)

At the same time, prodigality or confiscation had rendered many of those who survived unable to maintain their rank, and to bear the social and official burdens which, down to the end of the Western Empire were rigorously imposed on the great order. The games of the praetorship in the first century, as in the fifth,(419) constituted a tax which only a great fortune could easily bear. Aristocratic poverty became common. As early as the reign of Augustus, the emperor had found it politic to subsidise many great families.(420) The same policy had been continued by Tiberius, Nero, and Vespasian.(421) Tiberius, indeed, had scrutinised and discouraged some of these claims on grounds which the treasury officials of every age would applaud.(422) A grandson of the great orator Hortensius once made an appeal in the Senate for the means of supporting the dignity of his name. He had received a grant from Augustus to enable him to rear a family, and four sons were now waiting at the doors of the Curia to second his prayer. Hortensius, who was the great rival of Cicero, had possessed immense wealth. He had many splendid villas, he used to give dinners in his park, around which the deer would troop to the lute of a slave-Orpheus; he left 10,000 casks of old Chian in his cellars. His mendicant and spiritless descendant had to go away with a cold withering refusal from Tiberius, softened by a contemptuous dole to his sons. The revision of the senatorial roll by Claudius in 48 A.D., revealed a portentous disappearance of old houses of the Republic, and the gaps had to be filled up from the provinces in the teeth of aristocratic exclusiveness.(423) Among the boon companions of Nero there must have been many loaded with debt, like Otho and Vitellius. The Corvinus in Juvenal who is keeping sheep on a Laurentine farm, and his probable kinsman who obtained a subsidy from Nero, the Fabii and Mamerci who were dancing and playing the harlequin on the comic stage, or selling their blood in the arena, must represent many a wreck of the great houses of the Republic.(424) Among the motley crowd who swarm in the hall of the great patron to receive the morning dole, the descendants of houses coeval with the Roman State are pushed aside by the freedmen from the Euphrates.(425) But aristocratic poverty knew no lower depth of degradation than in the hungry adulation which it offered to the heirless rich. Captation became a regular profession in a society where trade, industry, and even professional skill, were treated as degrading to the men of gentle blood.(426) It is characteristic of Juvenal that he places on the same level the legacy-hunter, who would stoop to any menial service or vicious compliance, with the honest tradesfolk, in whose ranks, if we may judge by their funerary inscriptions, was to be found, perhaps, the wholesomest moral tone in the society of the early Empire.

In a satire written after Domitian’s death,(427) Juvenal has described a scene of fatuous adulation which, if not true in fact, is only too true to the character of the time. A huge mullet, too large for any private table, had been caught in a bay of the Adriatic. Its captor hastens through winter storms to lay his spoil at the emperor’s feet. The kitchen of the Alban palace had no dish large enough for such a monster, and a council of trembling senators is hastily summoned to consult on the emergency. Thither came the gentle Crispus, that Acilius, whose son was to be the victim of the despot’s jealousy, Rubrius tainted with a nameless crime, the bloated Montanus, and Crispinus, once an Egyptian slave, now a vulgar exquisite, reeking with unguents. There, too, was the informer whose whisper stabbed like a stiletto, the lustful, blind Catullus, and the arch flatterer Veiento, who had revelled at the Gargantuan feasts of Nero from noon till midnight. These are worthy brethren of the assembly who stabbed Proculus to death with their stiles at the nod of the freedman of Caligula,(428) and led Nero home in triumphal procession after his mother’s murder.(429)

Many things had contributed to the degradation of the senatorial character. The dark and tortuous policy of Tiberius tended, indeed, to absolutism; yet he still maintained a tone of deference to the Senate, and sometimes, with cold good sense, repelled a too eager adulation.(430) But, in the reigns of Caligula and Nero, the great order had to submit to the deepest personal degradation, and were tempted, or compelled by their masters to violate every instinct of Roman dignity. The wild epileptic frenzy of Caligula, who spared not the virtue of his sisters,(431) as he boasted of his own incestuous birth,(432) who claimed divine honours,(433) temples, and costly sacrifices, who, as another Endymion, called the Moon to his embraces, who dreamt of obliterating the memory of Homer and Virgil and Livy, was not likely to spare the remnant of self-respect still left in his nobles.(434) He gave an immense impetus to the rage for singing, dancing, and acting,(435) for chariot-driving and fighting in the arena, not unknown before, which Juvenal and Tacitus brand as the most flagrant sign of degenerate morals. There was indeed a great conflict of sentiment under the early Empire as to some of these arts. Julius Caesar had encouraged or permitted Roman senators and knights to fight in the gladiatorial combats, and a Laberius to act in his own play.(436) But a decree of the Senate, not long afterwards, had placed a ban on these exhibitions by men of noble rank.(437) Tiberius, who was, beyond anything, a haughty aristocrat, at a later date intervened to save the dignity of the order.(438) But the rage of the rabble for these spectacles had undoubtedly caught many in the ranks of the upper class. And Caligula and Nero(439) found, only too easily, youths of birth and breeding, but ruined fortune, who were ready to exhibit themselves for a welcome douceur, or to gain the favour of the prince, or even to bring down the applause of the crowded benches of the amphitheatre or the circus. Yet the old Roman feeling must have been very persistent, when a man like Domitian, who posed as a puritan, found it politic to remove from the Senate one who had disgraced his order by dancing in the pantomime, and even laid his interdict on all public theatrical performances.(440) The revels and massacres and wild debauchery of Nero did not so much to hasten his destruction as his singing his catches to the lute, or appearing in the parts of the incestuous Canace and the matricide Orestes.(441) From every part of the world, in all the literature of the time, there is a chorus of astounded indignation against the prince who could stoop to pit himself against Greek players and singers at Delphi or Olympia. Juvenal has been reproached for putting the chariot-driving of Damasippus in the same category with the Verrine plunder of provinces.(442) He is really the exponent of old Roman sentiment. And it may be doubted whether, from the Roman point of view, Juvenal might not justify himself to his critics. Even in our own emancipated age, we might be pardoned for feeling a shock if an English prime minister rode his own horse at the Derby, or appeared in a risky part on the boards of the Gaiety. And the collective sense of senatorial self-respect was too precious to a Roman patriot and moralist, to be flung away for mere love of sport, or in a fit of spurious artistic enthusiasm. Nero, and in an even lower fashion Caligula, were rebels against old Roman conventional restraints, and it is possible that some of the hideous tales about them, which were spread in the “circuli,” may have been the vengeance of Roman pride on shameless social revolutionaries, who paraded their contempt for old-fashioned dignity and for social tradition. Nero was never so happy as when he was deafened with applause, and smothered with roses at the Greek festivals. He had once predicted for him a monarchy in those regions of the East,(443) where he would have escaped from the tradition of old Roman puritanism, and combined all the ingenious sensuality of Syria with the doubtful artistic taste of a decadent Hellenism. The cold haughty refinement of senatorial circles of the old régime, and the rude honest virtue of the plebeian soldiery,(444) rightly mistrusted this false sensational artist on the throne of the world.

Art, divorced from moral ideals, may become a dangerous thing. The emperor might spend the morning with his favourites in patching up lilting verses which would run well to the lute.(445) But the scene soon changed to a revel, where the roses and music hardly veiled the grossness of excess. The “noctes Neronis” made many a debauchee and scattered many a senatorial fortune.(446) And amid all this elaborate luxury and splendour of indulgence, there was a strange return to the naturalism of vice and mere blackguardism. A Messalina or a Nero or a Petronius developed a curious taste for the low life that reeks and festers in the taverns and in the stews. Bohemianism for a time became the fashion.(447) Its very grossness was a stimulant to appetites jaded with every diabolical refinement of vicious ingenuity. The distinguished dinner party, with the emperor at their head, sallied forth to see how the people were living in the slums. Many a scene from these midnight rambles has probably been preserved in the tainted, yet brilliant, pages of the Satiricon. Petronius had probably often plunged with Nero after night-fall into those low dens, where slave minions and sailors and the obscene priests of the great Mother were roistering together, or sunk in the slumber of debauch.(448) These elegant aristocrats found their sport in rudely assaulting quiet citizens returning from dinner, or plundering some poor huckster’s stall in the Suburra, or insulting a lady in her chair. In the fierce faction fights of the theatre, where stones and benches were flying, the Emperor had once the distinction of breaking a praetor’s head.(449) It was nobles trained in this school, experts in vice, but with no nerve for arms, who encumbered the train of Otho on his march to the sanguinary conflict on the Po.(450)

The demoralisation of a section of the upper class under the bad emperors must have certainly involved the degradation of many women. And one of the most brilliant and famous of Juvenal’s Satires is devoted to this unsavoury subject. The “Legend of Bad Women” is a graphic picture, and yet it suffers from a defect which spoils much of Juvenal’s work. Full of realistic power, with an undoubted foundation of truth, it is too vehement and sweeping in its censures to gain full credence. It is also strangely wanting in balance and due order of idea.(451) The problem of marriage is illustrated by a series of sketches of female manners, which are very disconnected, and, indeed, sometimes inconsistent. Thorough depravity, superstition, and ignorant devotion, interest in literature and public affairs, love of gymnastic and decided opinions on Virgil—in fact, vices, innocent hobbies, and laudable tastes are all thrown together in a confused indictment. The bohemian man of letters had heard many a scandal about great ladies, some of them true, others distorted and exaggerated by prurient gossip, after passing through a hundred tainted imaginations. In his own modest class, female morality, as we may infer from the Inscriptions and other sources, was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age.(452) There were aristocratic families, too, where the women were as pure as Lucretia or Cornelia, or any matron of the olden days.(453) The ideal of purity, both in men and women, in some circles was actually rising. In the families of Seneca, of Tacitus, of Pliny and Plutarch, there were, not only the most spotless and high minded women, there were also men with a rare conception of temperance and mutual love, of reverence for a pure wedlock, to which S. Jerome and S. Augustine would have given their benediction. Even Ovid, that “debauchee of the imagination,” writes to his wife, from his exile in the Scythian wilds, in the accents of the purest affection.(454) And, amid all the lubricity of his pictures of gallantry, he has not lost the ideal of a virgin heart, which repels and disarms the libertine by the spell of an impregnable purity.(455) Plutarch’s ideal of marriage, at once severe and tender, would have satisfied S. Paul.(456) Favorinus, the friend and contemporary of Plutarch, thought it not beneath the dignity of philosophic eloquence to urge on mothers the duty of suckling and personally caring for their infants.(457) Seneca and Musonius, who lived through the reign of Nero, are equally peremptory in demanding a like continence from men and from women. And Musonius severely condemns concubinage and vagrant amours of every kind, the man guilty of seduction sins not only against another, but against his own soul.(458) Dion Chrysostom was probably the first of the ancients to raise a clear voice against the traffic in frail beauty which has gone on pitilessly from age to age. Nothing could exceed the vehemence with which he assails an evil which he regards as not only dishonouring to human nature, but charged with the poison of far spreading corruption.(459) Juvenal’s ideal of purity, therefore, is not peculiar to himself. The great world was bad enough, but there was another world beside that whose infamy Juvenal has immortalised.

It is also to be observed that Juvenal seems to be quite as much under the influence of old Roman conventionality as of permanent moral ideals. He condemns eccentricities, or mere harmless aberrations from old-fashioned rules of propriety, as ruthlessly as he punishes lust and crime. The blue-stocking who is a purist in style, and who balances, with deafening volubility, the merits of Homer and Virgil,(460) the eager gossip who has the very freshest news from Thrace or Parthia, or the latest secret of a tainted family,(461) the virago who, with an intolerable pride of virtue, plays the household tyrant and delivers curtain lectures to her lord,(462) seem to be almost as detestable in Juvenal’s eyes as the doubtful person who has had eight husbands in five years, or one who elopes with an ugly gladiator,(463) or tosses off two pints before dinner.(464) We may share his disgust for the great ladies who fought in the arena and wrestled in the ring,(465) or who order their poor tire-women to be flogged for deranging a curl in the towering architecture of their hair.(466) But we cannot feel all his contempt for the poor penitent devotee of Isis who broke the ice to plunge thrice in the Tiber on a winter morning, and crawled on bleeding knees over the Campus Martius, or brought a phial of water from the Nile to sprinkle in the fane of the goddess.(467) Even lust, grossness, and cruelty, even poisoning and abortion, seem to lose some of their blackness when they are compared with an innocent literary vanity, or a pathetic eagerness to read the future or to soothe the pangs of a guilty conscience.

The truth is that Juvenal is as much shocked by the “new woman” as he is by the vicious woman. He did not understand, or he could not acquiesce in the great movement for the emancipation of women, which had set in long before his time, and which, like all such movements, brought evil with it as well as good. There is perhaps nothing more striking in the social history of Rome than the inveterate conservatism of Roman sentiment in the face of accomplished change. Such moral rigidity is almost necessarily prone to pessimism. The Golden Age lies in the past; the onward sweep of society seems to be always moving towards the abyss. The ideal past of the Roman woman lay more than two centuries and a half behind the time when Juvenal was born. The old Roman matron was, by legal theory, in the power of her husband, yet assured by religion and sentiment a dignified position in the family, and treated with profound, if somewhat cold, respect; she was busied with household cares, and wanting in the lighter graces and charms, austere, self-contained, and self-controlled. But this severe ideal had begun to fade even in the days of the elder Cato.(468) And there is hardly a fault or vice attributed by Juvenal to the women of Domitian’s reign, which may not find parallel in the nine or ten generations before Juvenal penned his great indictment against the womanhood of his age. The Roman lady’s irritable pride of birth is at least as old as the rivalry of the two Fabiae in the fourth century.(469) The elder Cato dreaded a rich wife as much as Juvenal,(470) and satirised as bitterly the pride and gossip and luxury of the women of his time. Their love of gems and gold ornaments and many-coloured robes and richly adorned carriages, is attested by Plautus and the impotent legislation of C. Oppius.(471) Divorce and ghastly crime in the noblest families were becoming common in the days of the Second Punic War. About the same time began that emancipation of women from the jealous restraints of Roman law, which was to be carried further in the Antonine age.(472) The strict forms of marriage, which placed the wife in the power of her husband, fell more and more into desuetude. Women attained more absolute control over their property, and so much capital became concentrated in their hands that, about the middle of the second century B.C., the Voconian law was passed to prohibit bequests to them, with the usual futile result of such legislation.(473) Yet the old ideal of the industrious housewife never died out, and Roman epitaphs for ages record that the model matron was a wool-worker and a keeper at home. A senator of the reign of Honorius praises his daughter for the same homely virtues.(474) But from the second century B.C. the education of the Roman girl of the higher classes underwent a great change.(475) Dancing, music, and the higher accomplishments were no longer under a ban, although they were still suspected by people of the old-fashioned school. Boys and girls received the same training from the grammarian, and read their Homer and Ennius together.(476) There were women in the time of Lucretius, as in the time of Juvenal, who interlarded their conversation with Greek phrases.(477) Cornelia, the wife of Pompey, was trained in literature and mathematics, and even had some tincture of philosophy.(478) The daughter of Atticus, who became the wife of Agrippa, was placed under the tuition of a freedman, who, as too often happened, seems to have abused his trust.(479) Even in the gay circle of Ovid, there were learned ladies, or ladies who wished to be thought so.(480) Even Martial reckons culture among the charms of a woman. Seneca maintained that women have an equal capacity for cultivation with men.(481) Thus the blue-stocking of Juvenal, for whom he has so much contempt, had many an ancestress for three centuries, as she will have many a daughter till the end of the Western Empire.(482) Even in philosophy, usually the last study to attract the female mind, Roman ladies were asserting an equal interest. Great ladies of the Augustan court, even the empress herself, had their philosophic directors,(483) and the fashion perhaps became still more general under M. Aurelius. Epictetus had met ladies who were enthusiastic admirers of the Platonic Utopia, but the philosopher rather slyly attributes their enthusiasm to the absence of rigorous conjugal relations in the Ideal Society.(484) Even in the field of authorship, women were claiming equal rights. The Memoirs of Agrippina was one of the authorities of Tacitus.(485) The poems of Sulpicia, mentioned by Martial,(486) were read in Gaul in the days of Sidonius.(487) Greek verses, of some merit in spite of a pedantic affectation, by Balbilla, a friend of the wife of Hadrian, can still be read on the Colossus of Memnon.(488) Calpurnia, the wife of Pliny, may not have been an author; but she shared all Pliny’s literary tastes; she set his poems to music, and gave him the admiration of a good wife, if not of an impartial critic.

Juvenal feels as much scorn for the woman who is interested in public affairs and the events on the frontier,(489) as he feels for the woman who presumes to balance the merits of Virgil and Homer. And here he is once more at war with a great movement towards the equality of the sexes. From the days of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, to the days of Placidia, the sister of Honorius, Roman women exercised, from time to time, a powerful, and not always wholesome, influence on public affairs. The politic Augustus discussed high matters of state with Livia.(490) The reign of Claudius was a reign of women and freedmen. Tacitus records, with a certain distaste for the innovation, that Agrippina sat enthroned beside Claudius on a lofty tribunal, to receive the homage of the captive Caractacus.(491) Nero emancipated himself from the grasping ambition of his mother only by a ghastly crime. The influence of Caenis on Vespasian in his later days tarnished his fame.(492) The influence of women in provincial administration was also becoming a serious force. In the reign of Tiberius, Caecina Severus, with the weight of forty years’ experience of camps, in a speech before the Senate, denounced the new-fangled custom of the wives of generals and governors accompanying them abroad, attending reviews of troops, mingling freely with the soldiers, and taking an active part in business, which was not always favourable to pure administration.(493) In the inscriptions of the first and second centuries, women appear in a more wholesome character as “mothers of the camp,” or patronesses of municipal towns and corporations.(494) They have statues dedicated to them for liberality in erecting porticoes or adorning theatres or providing civic games or feasts.(495) And on one of these tablets we read of a Curia mulierum at Lanuvium.(496) We are reminded of the “chapter of matrons” who visited Agrippina with their censure,(497) and another female senate, under Elagabalus, which dealt with minute questions of precedence and graded etiquette.(498) On the walls of Pompeii female admirers posted up their election placards in support of their favourite candidates.(499) Thus Juvenal was fighting a lost battle, lost long before he wrote. For good or evil, women in the first and second centuries were making themselves a power.

Although he was probably a very light believer in the old mythology,(500) and treated its greatest figures with scant respect, Juvenal had all the old Roman prejudice against those eastern worships which captivated so many women of his day. And, here again, the satirist is assailing a movement which had set in long before he wrote, and which was destined to gain immense impetus and popularity in the two following centuries. The eunuch priests of the Great Mother, with their cymbals and Phrygian tiaras, had appeared in Italy in the last years of the Hannibalic War.(501) The early years of the second century B.C. were convulsed by the scandals and horrors of the Dionysiac orgies, which fell on Rome like a pestilence.(502) The purity of women and the peace of families were in serious danger, till the mischief was stamped out in blood. The worship of Isis found its way into the capital at least as early as Sulla, and defied the hesitating exclusion of Augustus.(503) At this distance, we can see the raison d’être of what the satirist regarded as religious aberrations, the full treatment of which must be reserved for another chapter. The world was in the throes of a religious revolution, and eagerly in quest of some fresh vision of the Divine, from whatever quarter it might dawn. The cults of the East seemed to satisfy cravings and emotions, which found no resting-place in the national religion. Their ritual appealed to the senses and imagination, while their mysteries seemed to promise a revelation of God and immortality. Their strange mixture of the sensuous and the ascetic was specially adapted to fascinate weak women who had deeply sinned, and yet occasionally longed to repent. The repentance indeed was often shallow enough; the fasting and mortification were compatible with very light morals.(504) There were the gravest moral abuses connected with such worships as that of Magna Mater. It is well known that the temples of Isis often became places of assignation and guilty intrigue.(505) An infatuated Roman lady in the reign of Tiberius had been seduced by her lover in the pretended guise of the god Anubis.(506) The Chaldaean seer or the Jewish hag might often arouse dangerous hopes, or fan a guilty passion by casting a horoscope or reading a dream.(507) But Juvenal’s scorn seems to fall quite as heavily on the innocent votary who was striving to appease a burdened conscience, as on one who made her superstition a screen for vice.

In spite of the political extinction of the Jewish race, its numbers and influence grew in Italy. The very destruction of the Holy Place and the external symbols of Jewish worship threw a more impressive air of mystery around the dogmas of the Jewish faith, of which even the most cultivated Romans had only vague conceptions.(508) The Jews, from the time of the first Caesar, had worked their way into every class of society.(509) A Jewish prince had inspired Caligula with an oriental ideal of monarchy.(510) There were adherents of Judaism in the household of the great freedmen of Claudius, and their growing influence and turbulence compelled that emperor to expel the race from the capital.(511) The worldly, pleasure-loving Poppaea had, perhaps, yielded to the mysterious charm of the religion of Moses.(512) But it was under the Flavians, who had such close associations with Judaea, that Jewish influences made themselves most felt. And in the reign of Domitian, two members of the imperial house, along with many others, suffered for following the Jewish mode of life.(513) Their crime is also described as “atheism,” and Clemens is, in the old Roman spirit, said to have been a man of the most “contemptible inactivity.” In truth, the “Jewish life” was a description which might cover many shades of belief and practice in religion, including Christianity itself. The secret worship of a dim, mysterious Power, Who was honoured by no imposing rites, a spirit of detachment and quietism, which shrank from games and spectacles and the scenes of fashion, and nursed the dream of a coming kingdom which was not of this world, excited the suspicion and contempt of the coarse, strenuous Roman nature. Yet, in the gloom and deep corruption of that sombre time, such a life of retreat and renunciation had a strange charm for naturally pious souls, especially among women. There were indeed many degrees of conformity to the religion of Palestine. While some were attracted by its more spiritual side, others confined themselves to an observance of the Sabbath, which became very common in some quarters of Rome under the Empire. The children, as Juvenal tells us, were sometimes trained to a complete conformity to the law of Moses.(514) But Juvenal is chiefly thinking of the mendicant population from Palestine who swarmed in the neighbourhood of the Porta Capena and the grove of the Muses, practising all the arts which have appealed in all ages to superstitious women. Thus the Judaism of the times of Nero or Domitian might cover anything from the cunning of the gipsy fortune-teller to the sad, dreaming quietism of Pomponia Graecina.(515)

Yet it must be admitted that, although Juvenal, in his attacks on women, has mixed up very real vice with superstition and mere innocent eccentricity, or the explosive energy of a new freedom, the real vices of many women of his time are a melancholy fact. The Messalinas and Poppaeas had many imitators and companions in their own class. It is true that even the licentious fancy of Ovid and Martial generally spares the character of the unmarried girl. She was, in the darkest times, as a rule, carefully guarded from the worst corruptions of the spectacles,(516) or from the reckless advances of the hardened libertine, although an intrigue with a tutor was not unknown.(517) Her marriage was arranged often in mere childhood, seldom later than her seventeenth year. A girl was rarely betrothed after nineteen.(518) Her temptations and danger often began on her wedding-day. That there was a high ideal of pure and happy marriage, even in the times of the greatest licence, we know from Pliny and Plutarch, and from Martial himself.(519) But there were serious perils before the child-bride, when she was launched upon the great world of Roman society. A marriage of convenience with some member of a tainted race, blasé with precocious and unnatural indulgence, and ready to concede the conjugal liberty which he claimed, was a perilous trial to virtue. The bonds of old Roman marriage had, for ages, been greatly relaxed, and the Roman lady of independent fortune and vigorous, highly trained intellect, could easily find consolation for marital neglect. From Seneca to S. Jerome, the foppish procurator of the great lady was a dangerous and suspected person,(520) and not always without good cause. Surrounded by an army of slaves and the other obsequious dependents of a great house, treated with profound deference, and saluted with the pompous titles of domina and regina, the great lady’s lightest caprice became law.(521) Costly jewels and the rarest luxuries of the toilet poured in upon her from regions which were only visited by the captains of Red Sea merchantmen, or by some Pythagorean ascetic seeking the fountains of the wisdom of the East.(522)

The political life of Rome had been extinguished by a jealous despotism, but social life in the higher ranks was never so intense and so seductive, and women had their full share in it. Ladies dined out regularly with their husbands, even at the emperor’s table,(523) and they were liable to be assailed by the artistic wiles of which Ovid taught the secret, or by the brutal advances of the lawless Caligula.(524) It was a time when people loved to meet anywhere, under the trees of the Campus Martius, in the colonnades of the theatre, or round the seats of the public squares. Everywhere were to be seen those groups which spared no reputation, not even the emperor’s. And behind the chair of the young matron often hovered the dangerous exquisite, who could hum in a whisper the latest suggestive song from Alexandria or Gades,(525) who knew the pedigree of every racehorse and the secret of every intrigue. It is at such scenes that Tacitus is probably glancing when he says that in Germany no one makes a jest of vice, or calls the art of corruption the fashion of the world;(526) chastity is not sapped by the seductions of the spectacles. Augustus had, indeed, set apart the upper seats for women in the theatre and amphitheatre,(527) but on the benches of the circus the sexes freely mingled. It was there, while the factions of the red and blue were shouting themselves hoarse, Ovid pointed out to his pupil in gallantry, that he had his fairest chance of making a dangerous impression.(528) Yet even Ovid is half inclined to be shocked at the scenes on the stage which were witnessed by women and young boys.(529) The foulest tales of the old mythology, the loves of Pasiphae or the loves of Leda, were enacted to the life, or told with a nakedness of language, compared with which even Martial might seem chaste.(530) Not less degrading were the gladiatorial shows, so lavishly provided by Augustus and Trajan, as well as by Caligula and Domitian, at which the Vestals had a place of honour.(531) It is little wonder that women accustomed to take pleasure in the sufferings and death of brave men, should be capable of condemning their poor slave women to torture or the lash for a sullen look, or a half-heard murmur. The grossness with which Juvenal describes the effect of the stage on the morals of women savours of the Suburra.(532) But of the poisonous character of these performances there can be no doubt. And actors, musicians, and gladiators became a danger to the peace of households, as well as to the peace of the streets. The artistes of the pantomime were sternly suppressed both by Tiberius and Domitian, and not without good cause.(533) One famous dancer had the fatal honour of captivating Messalina.(534) The empress of Domitian was divorced for her love of Paris.(535) And the scandals which darkened the fame of the younger Faustina, and impeached the legitimacy of Commodus, even if they were false, must have rested on a certain ground of probability.(536) It is melancholy to hear that M. Aurelius had to restrain the excesses of Roman matrons even under the reign of the philosophers.(537) To all these perils must be added the allurements of household slavery. While a Musonius or a Seneca was demanding equal chastity in man and woman, the new woman of Juvenal boldly claims a vicious freedom equal to her husband’s.(538) The testimony of Petronius is tainted by a suspicion of prurient imagination. But the student of other sources can hardly doubt that, in the first century, as in the fourth, the Roman lady of rank sometimes degraded herself by a servile liaison. A decree of Vespasian’s reign, which his biographer tells us was called for by the general licence, punished the erring matron with the loss of her rank.(539)

These illustrations from other authorities may serve towards a judicial estimate of Juvenal’s famous satire on women. That it is not a prurient invention is proved by the pages of Tacitus and Suetonius and the records of Roman morals for more than two centuries. On the other hand, it must be read with some reservations. Juvenal is a rhetorician with a fiery temperament, who will colour and exaggerate, if he will not invent. He is intensely prejudiced and conventional, a man to whom desertion of ancient usage is almost as bad as a breach of the moral law, a man incapable of seeing that the evils of a new social movement may be more than compensated by the good which it brings. Moreover, the graver vices which he depicts with so much realistic power were certainly not so general as he implies. It is to be suspected that single instances of abnormal depravity have swelled in his heated imagination till they have become types of whole classes of sinners. At the worst, these vices infected only a comparatively small class, idle, luxurious, enervated by the slave system, depraved by the example of a vicious court. The very scorn and indignation with which Juvenal pillories the aristocratic debauchee reveal the existence of a higher standard of virtue. Both the literature and the inscriptions of that age make us acquainted with a very different kind of woman. Over against the Hippia or Saufeia or Messalina of Juvenal we must set the pure and cultivated women whom we meet in the pages of Pliny or Tacitus, or the poor soldier’s concubine in the Inscriptions, who has all the self-denying love and virtue of our own cottagers’ wives.(540)

Just as Juvenal misunderstood the movement of female emancipation, which was to culminate in the legislation of the Antonine age, so has he misconceived some other great social movements of his time. Two in particular, the invasion of the new Hellenism and the rise of the Freedmen, he anathematises with the scorn and old Roman prejudice of the elder Cato.

There was nothing new in the invasion of Hellenism in the time of Juvenal. Nearly three hundred years before his day, the narrow conservatism of ancient Rome was assailed by the cosmopolitan culture of Hellas, which it alternately hated and admired. The knowledge of Greek was widely diffused in Italy in the time of the Hannibalic war.(541) Almost the last Roman of the ancient breed stooped in his old age to learn Greek, in order to train his son in the culture of the world.(542) But there were two different aspects of Hellenism. There was the Hellenism represented by Homer and Plato and Chrysippus; and there was the Hellenism of the low comic stage, of the pimp and parasite. And there were reactions against the lower Greek influences long before the days of Juvenal. Cicero, who did more than any man of his race to translate Greek thought into Roman idiom, yet expressed as bitter a contempt as Juvenal’s for the fickle, supple, histrionic Greek adventurer.(543) Juvenal is not waging war with that nobler Hellenism which had furnished models and inspiration to the great writers of the Augustan age, and which was destined to refashion Italian culture in the generation following his death. The emperors, from Julius Caesar to M. Aurelius, were, with few exceptions, trained in the literature of Greece, and some of them gave a great impetus to Greek culture in the West. Augustus delighted in the Old Comedy, entertained Greek philosophers in his house, and sprinkled his private letters to Tiberius with Greek quotations.(544) Tiberius, although he had lived at Rhodes in his youth, seems to show less sympathy for the genius of Greece.(545) Caligula also can hardly be claimed as a Hellenist. Although he had once a wild dream of restoring the palace of Polycrates, and one, more sane, of a canal through the Corinthian Isthmus, he also thought of wiping out the memory of the poems of Homer.(546) Dr. Mahaffy is probably right in treating Claudius as the first really Hellenist emperor.(547) Like our own James I., Claudius was a learned and very ludicrous person. Yet he was perhaps not so contemptible a character as he is painted by Suetonius. He had, at any rate, the merit of being a lover of Greek literature,(548) and he heaped honour on the country which gave it birth.(549) He used to quote Homer in his speeches in the Senate, and he composed histories in the Greek language, which, by an imperial ordinance, were to be read aloud regularly in the Museum of Alexandria.(550) In spite of the vices and pompous follies of Nero, his phil-Hellenism seems to have been a genuine and creditable impulse. His visits to the Greek festivals, and his share in the competitions, were not all mere vanity. He had a futile passion for fame as an artist, and he sought the applause of the race which had a real artistic tradition.(551) When we reach the plebeian Flavian race, Hellenism is still favoured. The bluff soldier, Vespasian, had an adequate command of the Greek language, and was the first emperor who gave liberal endowments to Greek rhetoric.(552) His son Domitian, that puzzling enigma, the libertine who tried to revive the morality of the age of Cato, the man who was said, but most improbably, to confine his reading to the memoirs of Tiberius, founded a quinquennial festival, with competitions, on the Greek model, in music, gymnastic, and horsemanship. By drawing on the inexhaustible stores of Alexandria, he also repaired the havoc which had been wrought in the Roman libraries by fire.(553) Already in Juvenal’s life the brilliant sophistic movement had set in which was destined to carry the literary charm of Hellenism throughout the West. From the close of the first century there appeared in its full bloom that ingenious technique of style, that power of conquering all the difficulties of a worn-out or trifling subject, that delicate command of all varieties of rhythm, which carried the travelling sophist through a series of triumphs wherever he wandered. Classical Latin literature about the same time came to a mysterious end. The only authors of any merit in the second century wrote in both languages indifferently.(554) And the great Emperor, who closes our period, preferred to leave his inner thoughts to posterity in Greek.

Juvenal, however, was not thinking of this great literary movement. Like so many of his literary predecessors, who had been formed by the loftier genius of the Greek past, like Plautus and Cicero, he vented his rage on a degenerate Hellenism. His shafts were levelled at the suttlers and camp-followers of the invading army from the East. The phenomena of Roman social history are constantly repeating themselves for centuries. And one of the most curious examples of perpetuity of social sentiment is the hatred and scorn for the Greek or Levantine character, from the days of Plautus and the elder Cato to the days of the poet Claudian.(555) For more than 600 years, the Roman who had borrowed his best culture, his polish and ideas from the Greek, was ready to sneer at the “Greekling.” The conquerors of Macedon could never forgive their own conquest by Greek knowledge and versatility, by which old Roman victories in the field had been avenged. And, as the pride of the imperial race grew with the consciousness of great achievements, the political degradation and economic decay of Greece and Greek-speaking lands produced a type of character which combined the old cleverness and keenness of intellect with the moral defects of an impoverished and subject race. Something of Roman contempt for the Greek must be set down to that national prejudice and difference of temperament, which made our ancestors treat the great French nation, with all its brilliant gifts and immense contributions to European culture, as a race of posturing dancing-masters.(556) Such prejudices are generally more intense in the lower than in the upper and the cultivated classes. Juvenal, indeed, was a cultivated man, who knew Greek literature, and had been formed by Greek rhetors in the schools. But he was also a Roman plebeian, with that pride of race which is often as deep in the plebeian as in the aristocrat. He gives voice to the feeling of his class when he indignantly laments that the true-born Roman, whose infancy has drunk in the air of the Aventine, should have to yield place to the supple, fawning stranger, who has come with the same wind as the figs and prunes. The Orontes is pouring its pollutions into the Tiber.(557) Every trade and profession, from the master of the highest studies down to the rope-dancer and the pander, is crowded with hungry, keen-witted adventurers from the East. Every island of the Aegean, every city of Asia, is flooding Rome with its vices and its venal arts.(558) Quickness of intellect and depravity of morals, the brazen front and the ready tongue are driving into the shade the simple, unsophisticated honesty of the old Roman breed. At the morning receptions of the great patron, the poor Roman client, who has years of honest, quiet service to show, even the impoverished scion of an ancient consular line, are pushed aside by some sycophant from the Euphrates,(559) who can hardly conceal the brand of recent servitude upon him. These men, by their smooth speech, their effrontery and ready wit, their infinite capacity for assuming every mood and humouring every caprice of the patron, are creeping into the recesses of great houses, worming out their secrets, and mastering their virtue.(560) Rome is becoming a Greek town,(561) in which there will soon be no place for Romans.

Much of this indictment, as we have said, is the offspring of prejudice and temperament. But there was a foundation of truth under the declamation of Juvenal. The higher education of Roman youth had for generations been chiefly in the hands of men of Greek culture, from the days of Ennius and Crates of Mallus, before the third Punic War.(562) The tutor’s old title literatus had early given place to that of grammaticus.(563) And, of the long line of famous grammatici commemorated by Suetonius, there are few who were not by origin or culture connected with the Greek east. Most of them had been freedmen of savants or great nobles.(564) Some had actually been bought in the slave market.(565) The profession was generally ill-paid and enjoyed little consideration, and it was often the last resort of those who had failed in other and not more distinguished callings. Orbilius, the master of Horace, had been an attendant in a public office.(566) Others had been pugilists or low actors in pantomime.(567) Q. Remmius Palaemon, whose vices made him infamous in the reign of Tiberius and Claudius, had been a house-slave, and was originally a weaver.(568) He educated himself while attending his young master at school, and by readiness, versatility, and arrogant self-assertion, rose to an income of more than £4000 a year. Sometimes they attained to rank and fortune by being entrusted with the tuition of the imperial children.(569) But the grammarian, to the very end, as a rule never escaped the double stigma of doubtful origin and of poverty.

The medical profession, according to the elder Pliny, was a Greek art which was seldom practised by Romans.(570) Julius Caesar, by giving civic rights to physicians from Egypt and Hellenic lands,(571) while he raised the status of the medical calling, also stimulated the immigration of foreign practitioners. The rank and fortune attained by the court physicians of the early Caesars, Antonius Musa, the Stertinii,(572) and others, which almost rivalled the medical successes of our own day, seemed to offer a splendid prize. Yet the profession was generally in low repute.(573) It was long recruited from the ranks of old slaves, and men of the meanest callings. Carpenters and smiths and undertakers flocked into it, often with only a training of six months.(574) Galen found most of his medical brethren utterly illiterate, and recommends them to pay a little attention to grammar in dealing with their patients.(575) They compounded in their own shops, and touted for practice.(576) They called in the aid of spells and witchcraft to reinforce their drugs. We need not believe all the coarse insinuations of Martial against their morality, any more than the sneers of Petronius against their skill. But we are bound to conclude that the profession held a very different place in public esteem from that which it enjoys and deserves in our own time.

Astrology, which was the aristocratic form of divination, and involved in many a dark intrigue of the early Empire, was a Greek as well as a Chaldaean art. The name of the practitioner often reveals his nationality. The Seleucus(577) and Ptolemaeus who affected to guide the fate of Otho, and the Ascletarion of Domitian’s reign,(578) are only representatives of a nameless crowd. And their strange power is seen in that tale of a Greek diviner, Pammenes, in the last years of Nero, whose horoscopes led to the tragic end of P. Anteius and Ostorius Scapula.(579) In other countless arts of doubtful repute, which ministered to the pleasure or amusement of the crowd, the Greek was always an adept. But it was his success as a courtier and accomplished flatterer of the great, which chiefly roused the scornful hatred of Juvenal and his fellows. The “adulandi gens prudentissima,” would hardly have been guilty of the simple and obvious grossness of flattery which the rhetoric of Juvenal attributes to them.(580) They knew their trade better than the Roman plebeian. It was an old and highly rewarded profession in Greece, and had often been the theme of Greek moralists. Plutarch wrote an elaborate treatise on the difference between the sycophant and the true friend, in which he seems almost to exhaust the wily resources of the pretender. Lucian, with his delicate irony, seems almost to raise the Greek skill in adulation to the level of a fine art.(581) And the polished and versatile Greek, with his lively wit, his delicate command of expression, his cool audacity, and his unscrupulousness, was a formidable rival of the coarser Roman parasite celebrated in Latin comedy. We can well imagine that the young Greek, fresh from the schools of Ionia, was a livelier companion at dinner than the proud Roman man of letters who snatched the dole and disdained himself for receiving it.

There is perhaps no phase of Roman society in Domitian’s day which we know more intimately than the life of the client. It is photographed, in all its sordid slavery, by both Juvenal and Martial. And Martial himself is perhaps the best example of a man of genius submitting, with occasional intervals of proud rebellion,(582) to a degradation which in our eyes no poverty could excuse. The client of the early Empire was a totally different person from the client of Republican times. In the days of freedom, the tie of patron and client was rather that of clansman and chief; it was justified by political and social necessity, and ennobled by feelings of loyalty and mutual obligation. Under the Empire, the relation was tainted by the selfish materialism of the age; it had seldom any trace of sentiment. The rich man was expected to have a humble train of dependents to maintain his rank and consequence. There was a host of needy people ready to do him such service. The hungry client rushed to his patron’s morning reception, submitted to all his coldness and caprice, or to the insolence of his menials, followed his chair through the streets, and ran on his errands, for the sake of a miserable alms in money or in kind.(583) The payment was sometimes supplemented by a cast-off cloak, or an invitation at the last moment to fill a place at dinner, when perhaps it could not be accepted.(584) In the train which the great man gathered about him, to swell his importance, were to be seen, not only the starving man of letters, the loafer and mere mendicant, but the sons of ruined houses “sprung from Troy,” and even senators and men of consular rank who had a clientèle of their own.(585)

Nothing throws a more lurid light on the economic condition of Italy in the time of the early Empire than this form of pensioned dependence. The impression which we derive from Juvenal and Martial is that of a society divided between a small class of immensely wealthy people, and an almost starving proletariat.(586) Poverty seems almost universal, except in the freedman class, who by an industrial energy and speculative daring, which were despised by the true-born Roman, were now rapidly rising to opulence. The causes of this plebeian indigence can only be glanced at here. The agricultural revolution, which ruined the small freeholders and created the plantation system,(587) had driven great numbers of once prosperous farmers to the capital, to depend on the granaries of the State, or on the charity of a wealthy patron. Such men were kept in poverty and dependence by that general contempt for trade and industrial pursuits which always prevails in a slave-owning society. Many of the greatest families had been reduced to poverty by proscription and confiscation. A great noble might be keeping sheep on a Laurentine farm, if he could not win a pension from the grace of the Emperor. At the same time, from various causes, what we should call the liberal professions, with the doubtful exception of medicine, tortured those engaged in them by the contrast between ambitious hopes and the misery of squalid poverty. “Make your son an auctioneer or an undertaker rather than an advocate or a man of letters” is the advice of Martial and Juvenal, and of the shrewd vulgar guests of Trimalchio.(588) Any mean and malodorous trade will be more lucrative than the greatest knowledge and culture. The rich literary amateur, who should have been a Maecenas, in that age became an author himself, composed his own Thebaid or Codrid, and would only help the poor man of genius by the loan of an unfurnished hall for a reading.(589) The unabashed mendicancy of Martial shows the mean straits to which the genuine literary man was reduced.(590) The historian will not earn as much as the reader of the Acta Diurna.(591) It is the same with education. What costs the father least is the training of his son. The man who will expend a fortune on his baths and colonnades, can spare a Quintilian only a fraction of what he will give for a pastry cook.(592) The grammarian, who is expected to be master of all literature, will be lucky if he receives as much for the year as a charioteer gains by a single victory.(593) If the rhetor, weary of mock battles, descends into the real arena of the courts, he fares no better.(594) The bar is overcrowded by men to whom no other career of ambition is open, by old informers who find their occupation gone, by the sons of noble houses who parade the glory of their ancestors in order to attract vulgar clients. They are carried in a litter, surrounded by slaves and dependents, down to the courts of the Centumviri. The poor pleader must hire or borrow purple robes and jewelled rings, if he is to compete with them. And in the end, he may find his honorarium for a day’s hard pleading to be a leg of pork, a jar of tunnies, or a few flasks of cheap wine. In this materialised society all the prizes go to the coarser qualities; there is nothing but neglect and starvation before taste and intellect. And poverty is punished by being forced to put on the show of wealth.(595) That stately person in violet robes who stalks through the forum, or reclines in a freshly decorated chair, followed by a throng of slaves, has just pawned his ring to buy a dinner.(596) That matron, who has sold the last pieces of her ancestral plate, will hire splendid dress, a sedan chair, and a troop of attendants, to go in proper state to the games.(597) Thus you have the spectacle of a society divided between the idle, luxurious rich and the lazy, hungry poor, who imitate all the vices of the rich, and although too proud to work, are not ashamed to borrow or to beg.

In such a society, where the paths of honest industry seemed closed to the poor, or as yet undiscovered, the great problem was how to secure without labour a share of the wealth which was monopolised by the few. The problem was solved by the obsequiousness of the client, or by the arts of the will-hunter. Owing to celibacy and vice, childlessness in that age was extraordinarily common in the upper class. In a society of “ambitious poverty,” a society where poverty was unable, or where it disdained, to find the path to competence through honest toil, the wealthy, without natural heirs, offered a tempting prey to the needy adventurer. Captation by every kind of mean flattery, or vicious service, became a recognised profession. In the Croton of Petronius there are only two classes, the rich and the sycophant, the hunters and the hunted.(598) Even men of high position, with no temptation from want, would stoop to this detestable trade.(599) And the social tone which tolerated the captator, made it almost an honour to be beset on a sick-bed by these rapacious sycophants. One of the darkest and most repulsive features in that putrescent society was the social value which attached to a vicious and shameful childlessness. A morose and unlovely old age could thus gather around it a little court of dependents and pretended friends, such as a career of great achievement would hardly attract. There have been few more loathsome characters than the polished hypocrite by the sick-bed of his prey, shedding tears of feigned sympathy, while with eager eyes he is noting every symptom of the approaching end.(600)

Juvenal and Petronius, the embittered plebeian, and the cynical, fastidious epicure of Nero’s court, alike treat their age as utterly corrupted and vulgarised by the passion for money; “inter nos sanctissima divitiarum Majestas.”(601) No virtue, no gifts, no eminence of service, will be noticed in the poor.(602) A great fortune will conceal the want of talent, sense, or common decency. Everything is forgiven to the master of money bags, even the brand of the slave prison.(603) In Juvenal and Martial probably the most resonant note is the cry of the poor—“How long.” Yet, after all, it is not a fierce cry of revolt; against that highly organised and centralised society the disinherited never dreamed of rebellion, even when the Goths were under the walls. It is rather an appeal, though often a bitter and angry appeal, for pity and a modest share in a wasted abundance. In the poems of Juvenal and Martial, as in the sentiment of the colleges and municipalities for generations, the one hope for the mass of helpless indigence lay in awaking the generosity and charity of the rich. The rich, as we shall see in another chapter, admitted the obligation, and responded to the claim, often in the most lavish fashion. A long line of emperors not only fed the mob of the capital, but squandered the resources of the State in providing gross and demoralising amusements for them.(604) Under the influence of the Stoic teaching of the brotherhood of man and the duty of mutual help, both private citizens and benevolent princes, from Nero to M. Aurelius, created charitable foundations for the orphan and the needy.(605) Public calamities were relieved again and again by imperial aid and private charity.(606) The love of wealth was strong, but a spirit of benevolence was in the air, even in the days of Juvenal; and the constant invectives of poet or philosopher against wealth and luxury are not so much the sign of a growing selfishness, as of a spreading sense of the duty of the fortunate to the miserable. Although the literary men seem never to have thought of any economic solution of the social problem, through the tapping of fresh sources of wealth from which all might draw, yet there can be no doubt that there was, at least in provincial cities, a great industrial movement in the Antonine age, which gave wealth to some, and a respectable competence to many. The opulent freedman and the contented artisan have left many a memorial in the inscriptions. Yet the movement had not solved the social problem in the days of Lucian, as it has not solved it after seventeen centuries. The cry of the poor against the selfish rich, which rings in the ears of the detached man of letters at the end of the Antonine age, will still ring in the ears of the ascetic Salvianus, when the Germans have passed the Rhine.(607)

The scorn and hatred of Juvenal for wealth and its vices is natural to a class which was too proud to struggle out of poverty, by engaging in the industries which it despised. And the freedman, who occupied the vacant field, and rose to opulence, is even more an object of hatred to Juvenal and Martial than the recreant noble or the stingy patron. He was an alien of servile birth, and he had made himself wealthy by the usual method of thinking of nothing but gold. These men, who were not even free Romans, had mastered the power which commands the allegiance of the world. The rise of this new class to wealth and importance probably irritated men of Juvenal’s type more than any other sign of social injustice in their time. And the Trimalchio of Petronius, a man of low, tainted origin, the creature of economic accident, whose one faith is in the power of money, who boasts of his fortune as if it had been won by real talent or honourable service, who expends it with coarse ostentation and a ludicrous affectation of cultivated taste, may be tolerated in literature, if not in actual life, for the charm of a certain kindly bonhomie and honest vulgarity, which the art of Petronius has thrown around him. Yet, after all, we must concede to Juvenal and Martial, that such a person is always a somewhat unpleasing social product. But the subject is so important that it claims a chapter to itself. And, fortunately for us and our readers, the new freedmen were not all of the type of Trimalchio.

III. THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN

The historian, who is occupied with war and politics, and the fate of princes and nobles, is apt to lose sight of great silent movements in the dim masses of society. And, in the history of the early Empire, the deadly conflict between the Emperor and the Senate, the carnival of luxury, and the tragic close of so many reigns, have diverted attention from social changes of immense moment. Not the least important of these was the rise of the freedmen, in the face of the most violent prejudice, both popular and aristocratic. And literature has thrown its whole weight on the side of prejudice, and given full vent alike to the scorn of the noble, and to the hate and envy of the plebeian. The movement, indeed, was so swift and far spreading that old conservative instincts might well be alarmed. Everywhere in the inscriptions freedmen are seen rising to wealth and consequence throughout the provinces, as well as in Italy, and winning popularity and influence by profuse benefactions to colleges and municipalities. In almost every district of the Roman Empire the order of the Augustales, which was composed to a great extent of wealthy freedmen,(608) has left its memorials. “Freedman’s wealth” in Martial’s day had become a proverb.(609) Not only are they crowding all the meaner trades, from which Roman pride shrank contemptuously, but, by industry, shrewdness, and speculative daring, they are becoming great capitalists and landowners on a senatorial scale. The Trimalchio of Petronius, who has not even seen some of his estates,(610) if we allow for some artistic exaggeration, is undoubtedly the representative of a great class. In the reign of Nero, a debate arose in the Senate on the insolence and misconduct of freedmen.(611) And it was argued by those opposed to any violent measures of repression, that the class was widely diffused; they were found in overwhelming numbers in the city tribes, in the lower offices of the civil service, in the establishments of the magistrates and priests; a considerable number even of the knights and Senate drew their origin from this source. If freedmen were marked off sharply as a separate grade, the scanty numbers of the freeborn would be revealed. In the reigns of Claudius and Nero especially, freedmen rose to the highest places in the imperial service, sometimes by unquestionable knowledge, tact, and ability, sometimes by less creditable arts. The promotion of a Narcissus or a Pallas was also a stroke of policy, the assertion of the prince’s independence of a jealous nobility. The rule of the freedmen was a bitter memory to the Senate.(612) The scorn of Pliny for Pallas expresses the long pent-up feelings of his order; it is a belated vengeance for the humiliation they endured in the evil days when they heaped ridiculous flattery on the favourite, and voted him a fortune and a statue.(613) Some part of the joy with which the accession of Trajan was hailed by the aristocracy was due to the hope that the despised interlopers would be relegated to their proper obscurity. Tacitus is undoubtedly glancing at the Claudian régime when he grimly congratulates the Germans on the fact that their freedmen are little above the level of slaves, that they have seldom any power in the family, and never in the State.(614)

It shows the immense force of old Roman conservatism and of social prejudice which is the same from age to age, when men so cultivated, yet of such widely different temperament and associations as Pliny and Tacitus, Juvenal and Martial(615) and Petronius, denounce or ridicule an irresistible social movement. We can now see that the rise of the emancipated slave was not only inevitable, but that it was, on the whole, salutary and rich in promise for the future. The slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free labouring class. But, unlike the mass of our artisans, it contained many who, from accident of birth and education, had a skill and knowledge which their masters often did not possess.(616) The slaves who came from the ancient seats of civilisation in the East are not to be compared with the dark gross races who seem to be stamped by nature as of an inferior breed. This frequent mental and moral equality of the Roman slave with his master had forced itself upon men of the detached philosophic class, like Seneca, and on kindly aristocrats, like Pliny.(617) It must have been hard to sit long hours in the library beside a cultivated slave-amanuensis, or to discuss the management of lands and mines and quarries with a shrewd, well-informed slave-agent, or to be charmed by the grace and wit of some fair, frail daughter of Ionia, without having some doubts raised as to the eternal justice of such an institution. Nay, it is certain that slaves were often treated as friends,(618) and received freedom and a liberal bequest at their master’s death. Many educated slaves, as we have seen, rose to distinction and fortune as teachers and physicians.(619) But the field of trade and industry was the most open and the most tempting. The Senator was forbidden, down to the last age of the Empire, both by law and sentiment, to increase his fortune by commerce.(620) The plebeian, saturated with Roman prejudice, looking for support to the granaries of the state or the dole of the wealthy patron, turned with disdain from occupations which are in our days thought innocent, if not honourable. Juvenal feels almost as much scorn for the auctioneer and undertaker as he has for the pander, and treats almost as a criminal the merchant who braves the wintry Aegean with a cargo of wine from Crete.(621) His friend Umbricius, worsted in the social struggle, and preparing to quit Rome for a retreat in Campania, among the other objects of his plebeian scorn, is specially disgusted with the low tribe who contract for the building of a house, or who farm the dues of a port or undertake to cleanse a river-bed.(622) There is no room left in Rome for men who will not soil themselves with such sordid trades. Manifestly, if the satirist is not burlesquing the feeling of his class, there was plenty of room left for the vigorous freedman who could accept Vespasian’s motto that no gain is unsavoury.(623) But those men had not only commercial tact and ability, the wit to see where money was to be made by seizing new openings and unoccupied fields for enterprise; they had also among them men of great ambitions, men capable of great affairs. It required no common deftness, suppleness, and vigilant energy for an old slave to work his way upwards through the grades of the imperial chancery, to thread the maze of deadly intrigue, in the reigns of Claudius or Nero, and to emerge at last as master of the palace. Yet one of these freedmen ministers, when he died, had served ten emperors, six of whom had come to a violent end.(624) That a class so despised and depressed should rise to control the trade, and even the administration of the Empire, furnishes a presumption that they were needed, and that they were not unworthy of their destiny.

Yet however inevitable, or even desirable, this great revolution may seem to the cool critic of the twentieth century, it is possible that, had he lived in the first, he might have denounced it as vigorously as Juvenal. The literary and artistic spirit, often living in a past golden age, and remotely detached from the movements going on around it, is prone to regard them with uneasy suspicion. It is moved by sacred sentiment, by memories and distant ideals, by fastidious taste, which expresses itself often with passionate hatred for what seems to it revolutionary sacrilege. It is also apt to fasten on the more grotesque and vulgar traits of any great popular movement, and to use a finished skill in making it ridiculous. It was in this way that literature treated the freedmen. They had many gross and palpable faults; they were old slaves and Orientals; as they rose in the world they were eager for money, and they got it; they were, many of them, naturally vulgar, and they paraded their new wealth with execrable taste, and trampled on better, though poorer, men than themselves, Juvenal and Martial, by birth and associations, have little in common with that accomplished exquisite of the Neronian circle who has painted with the power of careless genius the household of the parvenu Trimalchio. Yet they have an equal scorn or detestation for the new man who was forcing his way from the lowest debasement of servile life to fortune and power. But the embittered man of letters, humiliated by poverty, yet brimful of Roman pride, avenges his ideals with a rougher, heavier hand than the Epicurean noble, who had joined in the “Noctes Neronis” with a delicate, scornful cynicism, who was too disillusioned, and too fastidiously contemptuous, to waste anger on what he despised. Juvenal would blast and wither the objects of his hatred. Petronius takes the surer method of making these people supremely ridiculous. The feeling of men like Juvenal and Martial is a mixture of contempt and envy and outraged taste. The Grub Street man of letters in those days despised plodding industry because he dearly loved fits of idleness; he hated wealth because he was poor. The polished man of the world was alternately amused and disgusted by the spectacle of sudden fortune accumulated by happy chance or unscrupulous arts, with no tradition of dignity to gild its grossness, yet affecting and burlesquing the tastes of a world from which it was separated by an impassable gulf. There is more moral sentiment, more old Roman feeling, in the declamation of Juvenal than in the cold artistic scorn of the Satiricon; there is also more personal and class feeling. The triumph of mere money is to Juvenal a personal affront as well as a moral catastrophe. Poverty now makes a man ridiculous.(625) It blocks the path of the finest merit. The rich freedman who claims the foremost place at a levée is equally objectionable because he was born on the Euphrates, and because he is the owner of five taverns which yield HS.400,000 a year.(626) The impoverished knight must quit his old place on the benches to make way for some auctioneer or pimp, some old slave from the Nile who stalks in with purple robes and bejewelled fingers, and hair reeking with unguents.(627) The only refuge will soon be some half-deserted village on old-fashioned Sabine ground, where the country folk sit side by side in the same white tunics with their aediles in the grassy theatre.(628) It is evident from Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius that the popular hostility to the new men was partly the result of envy at their success, partly of disgust at their parade of it. Juvenal and Martial are often probably dressing up the rough epigrams of the crowd. We can almost hear the contemptuous growl as one of these people, suspected of a dark crime, sweeps by in his downy sedan. That other noble knight used to hawk the cheap fish of his native Egypt, and now possesses a palace towering over the Forum, with far-spreading colonnades and acres of shady groves.(629) A eunuch minister has reared a pile which out-tops the Capitol.(630) Fellows who used to blow the horn in the circus of country towns now give gladiatorial shows themselves.(631) Prejudice or envy may not improbably have invented some of the tales of crime and turpitude by which these fortunes had been won. Rome was a city of poisonous rumour. Yet slavery was not a nursery of virtue, and the Satiricon leaves the impression that the emancipated slave too often imitated the vices of his master. The poisoner, the perjurer, the minion, were probably to be found in the rising class. After their kind in all ages, they looked down with vulgar insolence on those less fortunate or more scrupulous. When they rose to the highest place, the imperial freedmen were often involved in peculation and criminal intrigue.(632) Yet, after all reservations, the ascent of the freedmen remains a great and beneficent revolution. The very reasons which made Juvenal hate it most are its best justification to a modern mind. It gave hope of a future to the slave; by creating a free industrial class, it helped to break down the cramped social ideal of the slave-owner and the soldier; it planted in every municipality a vigorous mercantile class, who were often excellent and generous citizens. Above all, it asserted the dignity of man. The vehement iteration of Juvenal is the best testimony to the sweep and force of the movement. And the later student of Roman society cannot afford to neglect a great social upheaval which, in an aristocratic society, dominated by pride of class and race, made an Oriental slave first minister of the greatest monarchy in history, while it placed men of servile origin in command of nearly all the industrial arts and commerce of the time.

The reign of the freedman in public affairs began with the foundation of the Empire, when Julius Caesar installed some of his household as officers of the mint.(633) The emperor in the first century was, theoretically at least, only the first citizen, and his household was modelled on the fashion of other great houses. In the management of those vast senatorial estates, which were often scattered over three continents, there was need of an elaborate organisation, and freedmen of education and business capacity were employed to administer such private realms. And in the organisation of a great household, there was a hierarchy of office which offered a career to the shrewd and trustworthy slave. Many such careers can be traced in the inscriptions, from the post of valet or groom of the bedchamber, through the offices of master of the jewels and the wardrobe, superintendent of the carriages or the vineyards, up to the highest financial control.(634)

During the first century the same system was transferred to the imperial administration. It suited the cautious policy of Augustus to disguise his vast powers under the quiet exterior of an ordinary noble; and the freedmen of his household carried on the business of the State. He sternly punished any excesses or treachery among his servants.(635) Tiberius gave them little power, until his character began to deteriorate.(636) Under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, the imperial freedmen attained their greatest ascendency. Callistus, Narcissus, and Pallas rose to the rank of great ministers, and, in the reign of Claudius, were practically masters of the world. They accumulated enormous wealth by abusing their power, and making a traffic in civic rights, in places or pardons. Polyclitus, who was sent to compose the troubles in Britain in 61 A.D., travelled with an enormous train, and gave the provinces an exhibition of the arrogance of their servile masters.(637) Helius was left to carry on the government during Nero’s theatrical travels, and the exhibitions of his artistic skill in Greece.(638) Galba put to death two of the great freedmen of Nero’s reign, but himself fell under the influence of others as corrupt and arrogant, and he showered the honours of rank on the infamous Icelus.(639)

It is curious that it was left for Vitellius to break the reign of the freedmen by assigning offices in the imperial bureaux to the knights, the policy which was said to have been recommended by Maecenas,(640) and which was destined to prevail in the second century. But the change was very incomplete, and the brief tragic reign of Vitellius was disgraced by the ascendency for a time of his minion Asiaticus, whom the Emperor raised to the highest honours, then sold into a troop of wandering gladiators, and finally received back again into freedom and favour.(641) The policy of the Flavian dynasty in the employment of freedmen is rather ambiguous. Vespasian is charged with having elevated Hormus, a disreputable member of the class, and with having appointed to places of trust the most rapacious agents.(642) But this is probably a calumny of the Neronian and Othonian circle who defamed their conqueror. Under Domitian, the freedmen, Entellus and Abascantus, held two of the great secretaryships. But it is distinctly recorded that Domitian distributed offices impartially between the freedmen and the knights.(643) On the accession of Trajan, Pliny, in his Panegyric, exults in the fall of the freedmen from the highest place.(644) Yet Hadrian is said to have procured his selection as emperor by carefully cultivating the favour of Trajan’s freedmen. Hadrian, in reorganising the imperial administration, and founding the bureaucratic system, which was finally elaborated by Diocletian and Constantine, practically confined the tenure of the three great secretaryships to men of equestrian rank. Among his secretaries was the historian Suetonius.(645) Antoninus Pius severely repressed men of servile origin in the interest of pure administration;(646) but they regained some influence for a time under M. Aurelius, and rose still higher under his infamous son.

The position of freedmen in the imperial administration was partly, as we have seen, a tradition of aristocratic households. The emperor employed his freedmen to write his despatches and administer the finances of the Empire, as he would have used them to write his private letters or to manage his private estates. But, in the long conflict between the prince and the Senate, the employment of trusted freedmen in imperial affairs was also a measure of policy. It was meant to teach the nobles that the Empire could be administered without their aid.(647) Nor was the confidence of the Emperor in his humble subordinates unjustified. The eulogies of the great freedmen in Seneca and Statius, even if they be exaggerated, leave the impression that a Polybius, a Claudius Etruscus, or an Abascantus were, in many respects, worthy of their high place. The provinces were, on the whole, well governed and happy in the very years when the capital was seething with conspiracy, and racked with the horrors of confiscation and massacre. This must have been chiefly due to the knowledge, tact, and ability of the great officials of the palace. Although of servile origin, they must have belonged to that considerable class of educated slaves who, along with the versatility and tact of the Hellenic East, brought to their task also a knowledge and a literary and linguistic skill which were not common among Roman knights. The three imperial secretaryships, a rationibus, a libellis, and ab epistulis, covered a vast field of administration, and the duties of these great ministries could only have been performed by men of great industry, talent, and diplomatic adroitness.(648) The Polybius to whom Seneca, from his exile in Sardinia, wrote a consolatory letter on the death of his brother, was the successor of Callistus, as secretary of petitions, in the reign of Claudius, and also the emperor’s adviser of studies. Seneca magnifies the dignity, and also the burden, of his great rank, which demands an abnegation of all the ordinary pleasures of life.(649) A man has no time to indulge a private grief who has to study and arrange for the Emperor’s decision thousands of appeals coming from every quarter of the world. Yet this busy man could find time for literary work, and his translations from the Greek are lauded by the philosopher with an enthusiasm of which the cruelty of time does not allow us to estimate the value.(650) The panegyric on Claudius Etruscus, composed by Statius, records an even more remarkable career.(651) Claudius Etruscus died at the age of eighty, in the reign of Domitian, having served in various capacities under ten emperors,(652) six of whom had died by a violent death. It was a strangely romantic life, to which we could hardly find a parallel in the most democratic community in modern times. Claudius, a Smyrniote slave,(653) in the household of Tiberius, was emancipated and promoted by that Emperor. He followed the train of Caligula to Gaul,(654) rose to higher rank under Claudius, and, probably in Nero’s reign, on the retirement of Pallas, was appointed to that financial office of which the world-wide cares are pompously described by the poet biographer.(655) The gold of Iberian mines, the harvests of Egypt, the fleeces of Tarentine flocks, pearls from the depths of Eastern seas, the ivory tribute of the Indies, all the wealth wafted to Rome by every wind, are committed to his keeping. He had also the task of disbursing a vast revenue for the support of the populace, for roads and bulwarks against the sea, for the splendour of temples and palaces.(656) Such cares left space only for brief slumber and hasty meals; there was none for pleasure. Yet Claudius had the supreme satisfaction of wielding enormous power, and he occasionally shared in its splendour. The poor slave from the Hermus had a place in the “Idumaean triumph” of Vespasian, which his quiet labours had prepared, and he was raised by that emperor to the benches of the knights.(657) The only check in that prosperous course seems to have been a brief exile to the shores of Campania in the reign of Domitian.(658)

Abascantus,(659) the secretary ab epistulis of Domitian’s reign, has also been commemorated by Statius. That great office which controlled the imperial correspondence with all parts of the world, was generally held by freedmen in the first century. Narcissus, in the reign of Claudius, first made it a great ministry.(660) Down to the reign of Hadrian the despatches both in Greek and Latin were under a single superintendence. But in the reorganisation of the service in the second century, it was found necessary, from the growing complication of business, to create two departments of imperial correspondence.(661) Men of rank held the secretaryship from the end of the first century. Titinius Capito, one of Pliny’s circle, filled the office under Domitian; Suetonius was appointed by Hadrian.(662) And during the Antonine age, the secretaries were often men of literary distinction.(663) Abascantus, the freedman secretary in the Silvae, had upon his shoulders, according to the poet, the whole weight of the correspondence with both East and West.(664) He received the laurelled despatches from the Euphrates, the Danube, and the Rhine; he had to watch the distribution of military grades and commands. He must keep himself informed of a thousand things affecting the fortunes of the subject peoples. Yet this powerful minister retained his native modesty with his growing fortune. His household was distinguished by all the sobriety and frugality of an Apulian or Sabine home.(665) He could be lavish, however, at the call of love or loyalty. He gave his wife Priscilla an almost royal burial.(666) Embalmed with all the spices and fragrant odours of the East, and canopied with purple, her body was borne to her last stately home of marble on the Appian Way.(667)

Some of the great imperial freedmen were of less unexceptionable character than Claudius Etruscus and Abascantus, and had a more troubled career. Callistus, Narcissus, and Pallas, were deeply involved in the intrigues and crimes connected with the history of Messalina and Agrippina. Callistus had a part in the murder of Caligula, and prolonged his power in the following reign. Narcissus revealed the shameless marriage of Messalina with Silius, and, forestalling the vacillation of Claudius, had the imperial harlot ruthlessly struck down as she lay grovelling in the gardens of Lucullus.(668) But he incurred the enmity of a more formidable woman even than Messalina, and his long career of plunder was ended by suicide.(669) Pallas had an even longer and more successful, but a not less infamous and tragic career.(670) Of all the great freedmen, probably none approached him in magnificent insolence. When he was impeached along with Burrus, on a groundless charge of treason, and when some of his freedmen were called in evidence as his supposed accomplices, the old slave answered that he had never degraded his voice by speaking in such company.(671) Never, even in those days of self-abasement, did the Senate sink so low as in its grovelling homage to the servile minister. At a meeting of the august body in the year 52, the consul designate made a proposal, which was seconded by a Scipio, that the praetorian insignia, and a sum of HS.15,000,000, should be offered to Pallas, together with the thanks of the state that the descendant of the ancient kings of Arcadia had thought less of his illustrious race than of the common weal, and had deigned to be enrolled in the service of the prince!(672) When Claudius reported that his minister was satisfied with the compliment, and prayed to be allowed to remain in his former poverty, a senatorial decree, engraved on bronze, was set up to commemorate the old-fashioned frugality of the owner of HS.300,000,000! His wealth was gained during a career of enormous power in the worst days of the Empire. He was one of the lovers of Agrippina,(673) and, when he made her empress on the death of Messalina, two kindred spirits for a time ruled the Roman world. He gratified his patroness by securing the adoption of Nero by Claudius, and he was probably an accomplice in that emperor’s murder. But his fate was involved with that of Agrippina. When Nero resolved to shake off the tyranny of that awful woman, his first step was to remove the haughty freedman from his offices.(674) Pallas left the palace in the second year of Nero’s reign. For seven years he lived on undisturbed. But at last his vast wealth, which had become a proverb, became too tempting to the spendthrift prince, and Pallas was quietly removed by poison.(675)

The wealth of freedmen became proverbial, and the fortunes of Pallas and Narcissus reached a figure hardly ever surpassed even by the most colossal senatorial estates.(676) The means by which this wealth was gained might easily be inferred by any one acquainted with the inner history of the times. The manner of it may be read in the life of Elagabalus, whose freedman Zoticus, the son of a cook at Smyrna, piled up vast riches by levying a payment, each time he quitted the presence, for his report of the emperor’s threats or promises or intentions.(677) In the administration of great provinces, in the distribution of countless places of trust, in the chaos of years of delation, confiscation, and massacre, there must have been endless opportunities for self-enrichment, without incurring the dangers of open malversation. Statius extols the simple tastes and frugality of his heroes Abascantus and Claudius Etruscus, and yet he describes them as lavishing money on baths and tombs and funeral pomp. The truth is that, as a mere matter of policy, these wealthy aliens, who were never loved by a jealous aristocracy, had to justify their huge fortunes by a sumptuous splendour. The elder Pliny has commemorated the vapour baths of Posides, a Claudian freedman, and the thirty pillars of priceless onyx which adorned the dining saloon of Callistus.(678) A bijou bath of the younger Claudius Etruscus seems to have been a miracle of costly beauty. The dome, through which a brilliant light streamed upon the floor, was covered with scenes in rich mosaic. The water gushed from pipes of silver into silver basins, and the quarries of Numidia and Synnada contributed the various colours of their marbles.(679) The gardens of Entellus, with their purple clusters which defied the rigours of winter, seemed to Martial to outrival the legendary gardens of Phaeacia.(680) In the suburbs, hard by the Tiburtine way, rose that defiant monument of Pallas, bearing the decree of the Senate, which aroused the angry scorn of the younger Pliny.(681)

The life of one of these imperial slave ministers was a strangely romantic career which has surely been seldom matched in the history of human fortunes. Exposed and sold in early youth in the slave markets of Smyrna, Delos, or Puteoli, after an interval of ignominious servitude, installed as groom of the chambers, thence promoted, according to his aptitudes, to be keeper of the jewels, or tutor of the imperial heir, still further advanced to be director of the post, or to a place in the financial service, the freedman might end by receiving the honour of knighthood, the procuratorship of a province, or one of those great ministries which placed him in command of the Roman world. Yet we must not deceive ourselves as to his real position.(682) To the very end of the Empire, the fictions on which aristocratic power is largely based, retained their fascination. In the fifth century a Senate, whose ancestors were often originally of servile race, could pour their scorn on the eunuch ministers of the East.(683) And the decaying or parvenu Senate of the Flavians had, when they were free to express it, nothing but loathing for the reign of the freedmen.(684) These powerful but low-born officials are a curious example of what has been often seen in later times, the point-blank refusal, or the grudging concession, of social status to men wielding vast and substantial power. The younger Pliny, in his Panegyric on Trajan, glories in the preference shown under the new régime for young men of birth, and in his letters he vents all the long-suppressed scorn of his order for the Claudian freedmen. Even the emperors who freely employed their services, were chary of raising them to high social rank. Freedmen ministers were hardly ever admitted to the ranks of the Senate(685); they were rarely present at its sittings, even at the very time when they were governing the world. Sacerdotal and military distinctions were seldom conferred upon any of them. They were sometimes invested with the insignia of praetorian or quaestorian rank.(686) A few were promoted to the dignity of knighthood, Icelus, Asiaticus, Hormus, and Claudius Etruscus(687); but many a passage in Martial or Juvenal seems to show that ordinary equestrian rank was in those days a very doubtful distinction.(688) The emperors, as raised above all ranks, might not have been personally unwilling to elevate their creatures to the highest social grade.(689) But even the emperors, in matters of social prejudice, were not omnipotent.

Still, the men who could win the favours of an Agrippina and a Messalina, could not be extinguished by the most jealous social prejudice. The Roman Senate were ready, on occasion, to fawn on a Pallas or a Narcissus, to vote them money and insignia of rank, nor did they always refuse them their daughters in marriage. In the conflict which is so often seen between caste pride and the effective power of new wealth, the wealth and power not unfrequently prevail. The lex Julia prohibited the union of freedmen with daughters of a senatorial house.(690) Yet we know of several such marriages in the first century. The wife of the freedman Claudius Etruscus, was the sister of a consul who had held high command against the Dacians.(691) Priscilla, the wife of Abascantus, another minister of servile origin, belonged to the great consular family of the Antistii. Felix, the brother of Pallas, had married in succession three ladies of royal blood, one of them the granddaughter of Cleopatra.(692)

The women of this class, for generations, wielded, in their own way, a power which sometimes rivalled that of the men. These plebeian Aspasias are a puzzling class. With no recognised social position, with the double taint of servile origin and more than doubtful morals, they were often endowed with many charms and accomplishments, possessing a special attraction for bohemian men of letters. Their morals were the result of an uncertain social position, combined with personal attractions and education. To be excluded from good society by ignoble birth, yet to be more than its equal in culture, is a dangerous position, especially for women. Often of oriental extraction, these women were the most prominent votaries of the cults or superstitions which poured into Rome from the prolific East. Loose character and religious fervour were easily combined in antiquity. And the demi-monde of those days were ready to mourn passionately for Adonis and keep all the feasts of Isis or Jehovah, without scrupling to make a temple a place of assignation.(693) The history of the early Empire, it has been rather inaccurately said, shows no reign of mistresses. Yet some of the freedwomen have left their mark on that dark page of history. Claudius was the slave of women, and two of his mistresses lent their aid to Narcissus to compass the ruin of Messalina.(694) The one woman whom Nero really loved, and who loved him in return, was Acte, who had been bought in a slave market in Asia. She captured the heart of the Emperor in his early youth, and incurred the fierce jealousy of Agrippina, as she did, at a later date, that of the fair, ambitious Poppaea.(695) Acte was faithful to his memory even after the last awful scene in Phaon’s gardens.(696) And, along with his two nurses, the despised freedwoman guarded his remains and laid the last of his line beside his ancestors. Caenis, the mistress who consoled Vespasian after his wife’s death, without any attractions of youth or beauty, suited well the taste of the bourgeois Emperor. It was a rather sordid and prosaic union. And Caenis is said to have accumulated a fortune, and besmirched the honest Emperor’s name, by a wholesale traffic in State secrets and appointments.(697) In the last years of our period a very different figure has been glorified by the art of Lucian. Panthea, the mistress of L. Verus, completely fascinated the imagination of Lucian when he saw her at Smyrna, during the visit of her lover to the East.(698) Lucian pictures her delicately chiselled beauty and grace of form by recalling the finest traits in the great masterpieces of Pheidias and Praxiteles and Calamis, of Euphranor and Polygnotus and Apelles; Panthea combines them all. She has a voice of a marvellous and mellow sweetness, which lingers in the ear with a haunting memory. And the soul was worthy of such a fair dwelling-place. In her love of music and poetry, combined with a masculine strength of intellect capable of handling the highest problems in politics or dialectic, she was a worthy successor of those elder daughters of Ionia whose charm and strength drew a Socrates or a Pericles to their feet.(699) Surrounded by luxury and the pomp of imperial rank, and linked to a very unworthy lover, Panthea never lost her natural modesty and simple sweetness.

The great freedmen, who held the highest offices in the imperial service till the time of Hadrian with almost undisputed sway, are interesting by reason of the strangely romantic career of some of them. But these are very exceptional cases. In the bureaux of finance, it has been discovered from the inscriptions that the officials were all of equestrian rank. On the other hand, a great number of the provincial procurators were freedmen. And the agents of the Emperor’s private fisc seem to have been nearly always drawn from this class. The lower grades of the civil service were full of them.(700) But to the student of society, the official freedmen are, as a class, not so interesting as their brethren who in these same years were making themselves masters of the trade and commercial capital of the Roman world. And the interest is heightened by the vivid art with which Petronius has ushered us into the very heart of this rather vulgar society. The Satiricon is to some extent a caricature. There were hosts of modest, estimable freedmen whose only record is in two or three lines on a funeral slab. Yet a caricature must have a foundation of truth, and a careful reader may discover the truth under the humorous exaggeration of Petronius.

The transition from the status of slave to that of freedman was perhaps not so abrupt and marked as we might at first sight suppose. It is probable that many a slave of the better and more intelligent class found little practical change in the tenor of his life when he received the touch of the wand before the praetor. Some, like Melissus, the free-born slave of Maecenas, actually rejected the proffered boon.(701) There was, of course, much cruelty to slaves in many Roman households, and the absolute power of a master, unrestrained by principle or kindly feeling, was an unmitigated curse till it was limited by the humane legislation of the second century.(702) But there must have been many houses, like that of the younger Pliny, where the slaves were treated, in Seneca’s phrase, as humble friends and real members of the family, where their marriages were fêted with general gaiety,(703) where their sicknesses were tenderly watched, and where they were truly mourned in death. The inscriptions reveal to us a better side of slave life, which is not so prominent in our literary authorities. There is many an inscription recording the love and faithfulness of the slave husband and wife, although not under those honoured names. And it is significant that on many of these tablets the honourable title of conjunx is taking the place of the old servile contubernalis. The inscriptions which testify to the mutual love of master and servant are hardly less numerous. In one a master speaks of a slave-child of four years as being dear to him as a son.(704) Another contains the memorial of a learned lady erected by her slave librarian.(705) Another records the love of a young noble for his nurse,(706) while another is the pathetic tribute of the nurse to her young charge, who died at five years of age. The whole city household of another great family subscribe from their humble savings for an affectionate memorial of their young mistress.(707) Seneca, in his humanitarian tone about slavery, represents a great moral movement, which was destined to express itself in legislation under the Antonines. And the energy with which Seneca denounced harsh or contemptuous conduct to these humble dependents had evidently behind it the force of a steadily growing sentiment. The master who abused his power was already beginning to be a marked man.(708)

Frequent manumissions were swelling the freedman class to enormous dimensions. The emancipation of slaves by dying bequest was not then, indeed, inspired by the same religious motive as in the Middle Ages. But it was often dictated by the natural, human wish to make some return to faithful servants, and to leave a memory of kindness behind. But without the voluntary generosity of the master, the slave could easily purchase his own freedom. The price of slaves varied enormously, according to their special aptitude and grade of service. It might range from £1700, in rare cases, to £10, or even less, in our money.(709) But taking the average price of ordinary slaves, one careful and frugal might sometimes save the cost of his freedom in a few years. The slave, especially if he had any special gift, or if he occupied a prominent position in the household, had many chances of adding to his peculium. But the commonest drudge might spare something from the daily allowance of food.(710) Others, like the cooks in Apuleius, might sell their perquisites from the remains of a banquet.(711) The door-keepers, a class notorious for their insolence in Martial’s day,(712) often levied heavy tolls for admission to their master’s presence. And good-natured visitors would not depart without leaving a gift to those who had done them service. It must also be remembered that the slave system of antiquity covered much of the ground of our modern industrial organisation. A great household, or a great estate, was a society almost complete in itself. And intelligent slaves were often entrusted with the entire management of certain departments.(713) The great rural properties had their quarries, brickworks, and mines; and manufactures of all kinds were carried on by servile industry, with slaves or freedmen as managers. The merchant, the banker, the contractor, the publisher, had to use, not only slave labour, but slave skill and superintendence.(714) The great household needed to be organised under chiefs. And on rural estates, down to the end of the Western Empire, the villicus or procurator was nearly always a man of servile origin.(715) In these various capacities, the trusted slave was often practically a partner, with a share of the profits, or he had a commission on the returns. Such a fortunate servant, by hoarding his peculium, might soon become a capitalist on his own account, and well able, if he chose, to purchase his freedom. His peculium, like that of the son in manu patris, was of course by law the property of his master. But the security of the peculium was the security for good service.(716) Thus a useful and favourite slave often easily became a freedman, sometimes by purchase, or, as often happened in the case of servants of the imperial house, by the free gift of the lord. There are even cases on record where a slave was left heir of his master’s property. Trimalchio boasted that he had been made by his master joint heir with the Emperor.(717)

The tie between patron and freedman was very close. The emancipated slave had often been a trusted favourite, and even a friend of the family, and his lord was under an obligation to provide for his future. The freedman frequently remained in the household, with probably little real change in his position. His patron owed him at least support and shelter. But he often gave him, besides, the means of an independent life, a farm, a shop, or capital to start in some trade.(718) In the time of Ovid, a freedman of M. Aurelius Cotta had more than once received from his patron the fortune of a knight, besides ample provision for his children.(719) A similar act of generosity, which was recklessly abused, is recorded by Martial.(720) By ancient law, as well as by sentiment, senators were forbidden to soil themselves by trade or usury.(721) But so inconvenient a prohibition was sure to be evaded. And probably the most frequent means of evasion was by entrusting senatorial capital to freedmen or clients, or even to the higher class of slaves.(722) When Trimalchio began to rise in the social scale, he gave up trade, and employed his capital in financing men of the freedman class.(723) These people, generally of Levantine origin, had the aptitude for commerce which has at all times been a characteristic of their race. And, in the time of the Empire, almost all trade and industry was in their hands. The tale of Petronius reveals the secret of their success. They value money beyond anything else; it is the one object of their lives. They frankly estimate a man’s worth and character in terms of cash.(724) Keen, energetic, and unscrupulous, they will “pick a farthing out of a dung-heap with their teeth”; “lead turns to gold in their hands.”(725) They are entirely of Vespasian’s opinion that gold from any quarter, however unsavoury, “never smells.” Taking the world as it was, in many respects they deserved to succeed. They were not, indeed, encumbered with dignity or self-respect. They had one goal, and they worked towards it with infinite industry and unfailing courage and self-confidence. Nothing daunts or dismays them. If a fleet of merchantmen, worth a large fortune, is lost in a storm, the freedman speculator will at once sell his wife’s clothes and jewels, and start cheerfully on a fresh venture.(726) When his great ambition has been achieved, he enjoys its fruits after his kind in all ages. Excluded from the great world of hereditary culture, these people caricature its tastes, and imitate all its vices, without catching even a reflection of its charm and refinement. The selfish egotism of the dissipated noble might be bad enough, but it was sometimes veiled by a careless grace, or an occasional deference to lofty tradition. The selfishness and grossness of the upstart is naked and not ashamed, or we might almost say, it glories in its shame. Its luxury is a tasteless attempt to vie with the splendour of aristocratic banquets. The carver and the waiter perform their tasks to the beat of a deafening music. Art and literature are prostituted to the service of this vulgar parade of new wealth, and the divine Homer is profaned by a man who thinks that Hannibal fought in the Trojan War.(727) The conversation is of the true bourgeois tone, with all its emphasis on the obvious, its unctuous moralising, its platitudes consecrated by their antiquity.

It is this society which is drawn for us with such a sure, masterly hand, and with such graceful ease, by Petronius. The Satiricon is well known to be one of the great puzzles and mysteries in Roman literature. Scholars have held the most widely different opinions as to its date, its author, and its purpose. The scene has been laid in the reign of Augustus or of Tiberius, and, on the strength of a misinterpreted inscription, even as late as the reign of Alexander Severus.(728) Those who have attributed it to the friend and victim of Nero have been confronted with the silence of Quintilian, Juvenal, and Martial, with the silence of Tacitus as to any literary work by Petronius, whose character and end he has described with a curious sympathy and care.(729) It is only late critics of the lower empire, such as Macrobius,(730) and a dilettante aristocrat like Sidonius Apollinaris,(731) who pay any attention to this remarkable work of genius. And Sidonius seems to make its author a citizen of Marseilles.(732) Yet silence in such cases may be very deceptive. Martial and Statius never mention one another, and both might seem unknown to Tacitus. And Tacitus, after the fashion of the Roman aristocrat, in painting the character of Petronius, may not have thought it relevant or important to notice a light work such as the Satiricon, even if he had ever seen it. He does not think it worth while to mention the histories of the Emperor Claudius, the tragedies of Seneca, or the Punica of Silius Italicus.(733) Tacitus, like Thucydides, is too much absorbed in the social tragedy of his time to have any thought to spare for its artistic efforts. The rather shallow, easy-going Pliny has told us far more of social life in the reigns of Domitian and Trajan, its rural pleasures and its futile literary ambitions, than the great, gloomy historian who was absorbed in the vicissitudes of the deadly duel between the Senate and the Emperors. One thing is certain about the author of this famous piece—he was not a plebeian man about town, although it may be doubted whether M. Boissier is safe in maintaining that such a writer would not have chosen his own environment of the Suburra as the field for his imagination.(734) It is safer to seek for light on the social status of the author in the tone of his work. The Satiricon is emphatically the production of a cultivated aristocrat, who looks down with serene and amused scorn on the vulgar bourgeois world which he is painting. He is interested in it, but it is the interest of the detached, artistic observer, whose own world is very far off. Encolpius and Trimalchio and his coarse freedman friends are people with whom the author would never have dined, but whom, at a safe social distance, he found infinitely amusing as well as disgusting. He saw that a great social revolution was going on before his eyes, that the old slave minion, with estates in three continents, was becoming the rival of the great noble in wealth, that the new-sprung class were presenting to the world a vulgar caricature of the luxury in the palaces on the Esquiline. Probably he thought it all bad,(735) but the bad became worse when it was coarse and vulgar. The ignorant assumption of literary and artistic taste in Trimalchio must have been contrasted in the author’s mind with many an evening at the palace, when Nero, in his better moods, would recite his far from contemptible verses, or his favourite passages from Euripides, and when the new style of Lucan would be balanced against that of the great old masters.(736) And the man who had been charmed with the sprightly grace of the stately and charming Poppaea may be forgiven for showing his hard contempt for Fortunata, who, in the middle of dinner, runs off to count the silver and deal out the slaves’ share of the leavings, and returns to get drunk and fight with one of her guests.(737)

The motive of the work has been much debated. It has been thought a satire on the Neronian circle, and again an effort to gratify it, by a revelation of the corruptions of the plebeian world, the same impulse which drove Messalina to the brothel, and Nero to range the taverns at midnight.(738) It has been thought a satire on the insolence and grossness of Pallas and the freedmen of the Claudian régime which Nero detested, to amuse him with all their vulgar absurdities. Is it not possible that the writer was merely pleasing himself—that he was simply following the impulse of genius? Since the seventh century the work has only existed in fragments.(739) Who can tell how much the lost portions, if we possessed them, might affect our judgment of the object of the work? One thing is certain, its author was a very complex character, and would probably have smiled at some of the lumbering efforts to read his secret. Even though he may have had no lofty purpose, a weary man of pleasure may have wished to display, in its grossest, vulgarest form, the life of which he had tasted the pleasures, and which he had seen turning into Dead Sea fruit. He was probably a bad man in his conduct, worse perhaps in his imagination; and yet, by a strange contradiction, which is not unexampled in the history of character, he may have had dreams of a refined purity and temperance which tortured and embittered him by their contrast with actual life.

Out of the smoke of controversy, the conclusion seems to have emerged that the Satiricon is a work of Nero’s reign, and that its author was in all probability that Caius Petronius who was Nero’s close companion, and who fell a victim to the jealousy of Tigellinus. Not the least cogent proof of this is the literary criticism of the work. It is well known that Lucan, belonging to the Spanish family of the Senecas, had thrown off many of the conventions of Roman literature, and discarded the machinery of epic mythology in his Pharsalia. He had also incurred the literary jealousy of Nero. The attack in the Satiricon on Lucan’s literary aberrations can hardly be mistaken. The old poet Eumolpus is introduced to defend the traditions of the past. And he gives a not very successful demonstration, in 285 verses, of the manner in which the subject should have been treated, with all the scenery and machinery of orthodox epic.(740) This specimen of conservative taste is the least happy part of the work.

Such evidence is reinforced by the harmony of the whole tone of the Satiricon with the clear-cut character of Petronius in Tacitus. There was evidently a singular fascination about this man, which, in spite of his wasted, self-indulgent life, was keenly felt by the severe historian. Petronius was capable of great things, but in an age of wild licence he deliberately devoted his brilliant talent to making sensuality a fine art. Like Otho, who belonged to the same circle, he showed, as consul and in the government of Bithynia, that a man of pleasure could be equal to great affairs.(741) After this single digression from the scheme of the voluptuary, he returned to his pleasures, and became an arbiter in all questions of sensual taste, from whose decision there was no appeal. His ascendency over the Emperor drew upon him the fatal enmity of Tigellinus. Petronius was doomed. It was a time when not even the form of justice was used to veil the caprices of tyranny, and Petronius determined not to endure a long suspense when the issue was certain. He had gone as far as Cumae to attend the Emperor. There he was stopped. He retired to his chamber and had his veins alternately opened and rebound, meanwhile conversing with his friends or listening to light verses, not, as the fashion then was, seeking consolation from a Stoic director on the issues of life and death. He rewarded some of his slaves; others he had flogged before his eyes. After a banquet he fell calmly into his last sleep In his will there was none of the craven adulation by which the victim often strove to save his heirs from imperial rapacity. He broke his most precious myrrhine vase, to prevent its being added to Nero’s treasures.(742) His only bequest to the Emperor was a stinging catalogue of his secret and nameless sins.(743)

The Satiricon, as we have it, is only a fragment, containing parts of two books, out of a total of sixteen. It is full of humorous exaggeration and wild Aristophanic fun, along with, here and there, very subtle and refined delineation of character. But, except in the famous dinner of Trimalchio, there are few signs of regular construction or closeness of texture in plot and incident. Even if we had the whole, it might have been difficult to decipher its motive or to unlock the secret of the author’s character. We can only be sure that he was a man of genius, and that he was interested in the intellectual pursuits and tendencies of his time, as well as in its vices and follies. We may perhaps surmise that he was at once perverted and disillusioned, alternately fascinated and disgusted by the worship of the flesh and its lusts in that evil time. He is not, as has been sometimes said, utterly devoid of a moral sense. Occasionally he shows a gleam of nobler feeling, a sense of the lacrimae rerum, as in that passage where the corpse of the shipwrecked Lichas is washed ashore. “Somewhere a wife is quietly awaiting him, or a father or a son, with no thought of storm; some one whom he kissed on leaving.... He had examined the accounts of his estates, he had pictured to himself the day of his return to his home. And now he lies, O ye gods, how far from the goal of his hopes. But the sea is not the only mocker of the hopes of men. If you reckon well, there is shipwreck everywhere.”(744) There is also a curious note of contempt for his own age in a passage on the decay of the fine arts. The tone is, for the moment, almost that of Ruskin. The glories of the golden age of art were the result of simple virtue. An age like the Neronian, an age abandoned to wine and harlotry, which dreams only of making money by any sordid means, cannot even appreciate what the great masters have left behind, much less itself produce anything worthy. Even the gods of the Capitol are now honoured by an offering of crude bullion, not by the masterpieces of a Pheidias or an Apelles. And the race which created them are now for us, forsooth, silly Greeklings!(745)

Yet side by side with a passage like this, there are descriptions of abnormal depravity so coarsely realistic that it has often been assumed, and not unnaturally, that the writer rioted in mere filth. It should be remembered, however, that there was a tradition of immorality about the ancient romance,(746) and Petronius, had he cared to do so, might have made the same apology as Martial, that he provided what his readers demanded.(747) That Petronius was deeply tainted is only too probable from his associations, although Tacitus implies that he was rather a fastidious voluptuary than a gross debauchee. Yet a sensualist of the intellectual range of Petronius may have occasionally visions of a better world than that to which he has sunk. Is it not possible that the gay elegant trifler may sometimes have scorned himself as he scorned his time? Is it not possible that, along with other illusions, he had parted with the illusions of vice, and that in the “noctes Neronis” he had seen the adder among the roses? He has written one of the keenest satires ever penned on the vulgarity of mere wealth, its absurd affectations, its vanity, its grossness. May he not also have wished, without moralising in a fashion which so cultivated a trifler would have scorned, to reveal the abyss towards which a society lost to all the finer passions of the spirit was hurrying? In the half comic, half ghastly scene in which Trimalchio, in a fit of maudlin sentiment, has himself laid out for dead, while the horns blare out his funeral lament, we seem to hear the knell of a society which was the slave of gold and gross pleasure, and seemed to be rotting before its death.

But it need hardly be said that the prevailing note of the Satiricon is anything but melancholy. The author is intensely amused with his subject, and the piece is full of the most riotous fun and humour. It belongs formally to the medley of prose and verse which Varro introduced into Roman literature on the model of Menippus of Gadara.(748) It contains disquisitions on literary tendencies of the day in poetry and oratory, anecdotes and desultory talk. But Petronius has given a new character to the old “Satura,” more in the manner of the Greek romance. There probably was no regular plot in the complete work, no central motive, such as the wrath of Priapus,(749) to bind it together. Yet there is a certain bond of union in the narrative of lively, and often questionable, adventures through which Petronius carries his very disreputable characters. In this life and movement, this human interest, the Satiricon is the distant ancestor of Gil Blas, Roderick Random, and Tom Jones.

The scene of the earlier part, long since lost, may have been laid at Massilia.(750) In the two books partially preserved to us, it lies in southern Italy, at Cumae or Croton, in those Greek towns which had plenty of Greek vice, without much Greek refinement.(751) The three strangers, whose adventures are related, Encolpius, Ascyltus, and Giton, if we may judge by their names, are also Greek, with the literary culture of their time, and deeply tainted with its worst vices. At the opening of our fragment, Encolpius, a beggarly, wandering sophist, is declaiming in a portico on the decay of oratory.(752) He is expressing what was probably Petronius’s own judgment, as it was that of Tacitus,(753) as to the evil effects of school declamation on musty or frivolous subjects. He is met by a rival lecturer, Agamemnon, who urges, on behalf of the unfortunate teachers of this conventional rhetoric, that the fault lies not with them, but with the parents and the public, the same excuse, in fact, which Plato had long before made for the maligned sophist of the fifth century B.C.(754) But Encolpius and his companions, in spite of these literary interests, are the most disreputable adventurers, educated yet hopelessly depraved. They are even more at home in the reeking slums than in the lecture hall. Encolpius has been guilty of murder, theft, seduction. The party are alternately plunderers and plundered. They riot for the moment in foul excesses, and are tortured by jealousy and the miseries of squalid vice. Only those who have a taste for pornography will care to follow them in these dark paths. Reduced to the last pinch of poverty, they are invited to dine at the all-welcoming table of Trimalchio, and this is for us the most interesting passage in their adventures. But, on leaving the rich freedman’s halls they once more pass into scenes where a modern pen cannot venture to follow them. Yet soon afterwards, Encolpius is found in a picture gallery discussing the fate of literature and art with Eumolpus,(755) an inveterate poet, as vicious as himself. Presently the party are on shipboard off the south Italian coast. They are shipwrecked and cast ashore in a storm near the town of Croton.(756) A friendly peasant informs them that, if they are honest merchants, that is no place for their craft. But if they belong to the more distinguished world of intrigue, they may make their fortune. It is a society which has no care for letters or virtue, which thinks only of unearned gain. There are only two classes, the deceivers and their victims. Children are an expensive luxury, for only the childless ever receive an invitation or any social attention. It is like a city ravaged by the plague; there are only left the corpses and the vultures.(757) The adventurers resolve to seize the rare opportunity; they will turn the tables on the social birds of prey. The pauper poet is easily translated into a millionaire with enormous estates in Africa.(758) A portion of his wealth has been engulfed in the storm, but a solid HS.300,000,000, with much besides, still remains. He has a cough, moreover, with other signs of debility. There is no more idiotic person, as our Stock Exchange records show, than a man eager for an unearned fortune. The poor fools flocked around Eumolpus, drinking in every fresh rumour about his will. He was loaded with gifts;(759) great ladies made an easy offer of their virtue and even that of their children.(760) Meanwhile he, or Petronius, plays with their follies or tortures their avidity. In one of his many wills, the heirs of the pretended Croesus are required not to touch their booty till they have devoured his remains before the people!(761) The tales of barbarian tribes in Herodotus, the memories of the siege of Saguntum and Numantia, are invoked in brutal irony to justify the reasonableness of the demand. “Close your eyes,” the cynic enjoins, “and fancy that instead of devouring human flesh, you are swallowing a million of money.” Petronius could be very brutal as well as very refined in his raillery. The combined stupidity and greed of the fortune-hunter of all ages are perhaps best met by such brutality of contempt.

The really interesting part of their adventure is the dinner at the house of Trimalchio, a rich freedman, to which these rascals were invited. Trimalchio is probably in many traits drawn from life, but the picture of himself, of his wife and his associates, is a work of genius worthy of Fielding or Smollett or Le Sage. Petronius, it is clear, enjoyed his work, and, in spite of his contempt for the vulgar ambition and the coarseness and commonness of Trimalchio’s class, he has a liking for a certain simplicity and honest good nature in Trimalchio. The freedman tells the story of his own career(762) without reserve, and with a certain pride in the virtue and frugality, according to his standards, which have made him what he is. He also exults in his shrewdness and business capacity. His motto has always been, “You are worth just what you have.” “Buy cheap and sell dear.” Coming as a little slave boy from Asia, probably in the reign of Augustus,(763) he became the favourite of his master, and more than the favourite of his mistress. He found himself in the end the real master of the household, and, on his patron’s death, he was left joint-heir to his property with the emperor. But he had ambitions beyond even such a fortune. He became a ship-owner on a great scale. He lost a quarter of a million in a single storm, and at once proceeded to build more and larger ships. Money poured in; all his ventures prospered. He bought estates in Italy, Sicily, and Africa. Some of his purchases he had never seen.(764) He built himself a stately house, with marble porticoes, four great banqueting-halls, and twenty sleeping-rooms.(765) Everything to satisfy human wants was produced upon his lands. He was a man of infinite enterprise. He had improved the breed of his flocks by importing rams from Tarentum. He had bees from Hymettus in his hives. He sent to India for mushroom spawn.(766) A gazette was regularly brought out, full of statistics, and all the daily incidents on his estates;(767) the number of slave births and deaths; a slave crucified for blaspheming the genius of the master; a fire in the bailiff’s house; the divorce of a watchman’s wife, who had been caught in adultery with the bathman; a sum of HS.100,000 paid into the chest, and waiting for investment—these are some of the items of news. Trimalchio, who bears now, after the fashion of his class, the good Roman name of Caius Pompeius, has risen to the dignity of Sevir Augustalis in his municipality;(768) he is one of the foremost persons in it, with an overwhelming sense of the dignity of wealth, and with a ridiculous affectation of artistic and literary culture, which he parades with a delightful unconsciousness of his blunders.

When the wandering adventurers arrive for dinner,(769) they find a bald old man in a red tunic playing at ball, with eunuchs in attendance. While he is afterwards being rubbed down with unguents in the bath, his servants refresh themselves with old Falernian. Then, with four richly dressed runners preceding him, and wrapped in a scarlet mantle, he is borne to the house in his sedan along with his ugly minion. On the wall of the vestibule, as you entered, there were frescoes, one of which represented the young Trimalchio, under the leadership of Minerva, making his entry into Rome, with other striking incidents of his illustrious career, while Fortune empties her flowing horn, and the Fates spin the golden thread of his destiny.(770) The banquet begins; Alexandrian boys bring iced water and delicately attend to the guests’ feet, singing all the while.(771) Indeed, the whole service is accompanied by singing, and the blare of instruments. To a great, deafening burst of music, the host is at last borne in buried in cushions, his bare shaven head protruding from a scarlet cloak, with a stole around his neck, and lappets falling on each side; his hands and arms loaded with rings.(772) Not being just then quite ready for dinner, he, with a kindly apology, has a game of draughts, until he feels inclined to eat, the pieces on the terebinthine board being, appropriately to such a player, gold and silver coins.(773) The dinner is a long series of surprises, on the artistic ingenuity of which Trimalchio plumes himself vastly. One course represents the twelve signs of the Zodiac, of which the host expounds at length the fateful significance.(774) Another dish was a large boar, with baskets of sweetmeats hanging from its tusks. A huge bearded hunter pierced its sides with a hunting knife, and forthwith from the wound there issued a flight of thrushes which were dexterously captured in nets as they flew about the room.(775) Towards the end of the meal the guests were startled by strange sounds in the ceiling, and a quaking of the whole apartment. As they raised their eyes, the ceiling suddenly opened, and a great circular tray descended, with a figure of Priapus, bearing all sorts of fruit and bon-bons.(776) It may be readily assumed that in such a scene the wine was not stinted. Huge flagons, coated with gypsum, were brought in shoulder high, each with a label attesting that it was the great Falernian vintage of Opimius, one hundred years old.(777) As the wine appeared, the genial host remarked with admirable frankness, “I did not give as good wine yesterday, although I had a more distinguished company!”

The amusements of the banquet were as various, and some of them as coarse or fantastic, as the dishes. They are gross and tasteless exaggerations of the prevailing fashion. In a literary age, a man of Trimalchio’s position must affect some knowledge of letters and art. He is a ludicrous example of the dogmatism of pretentious ignorance in all ages. He has a Greek and Latin library,(778) and pretends to have once read Homer, although his recollections are rather confused. He makes, for instance, Daedalus shut Niobe into the Trojan horse; Iphigenia becomes the wife of Achilles; Helen is the sister of Diomede and Ganymede.(779) One of the more refined entertainments which are provided is the performance of scenes from the Homeric poems, which Trimalchio accompanied by reading in a sonorous voice from a Latin version.(780) He is himself an author, and has his poems recited by a boy personating the Bacchic god.(781) As a connoisseur of plate he will yield to no one,(782) although he slyly confesses that his “real Corinthian” got their name from the dealer Corinthus. The metal came from the fused bronze and gold and silver which Hannibal flung into the flames of captured Troy. But Trimalchio’s most genuine taste, as he naïvely confesses, is for acrobatic feats and loud horn-blowing. And so, a company of rope-dancers bore the guests with their monotonous performances.(783) Blood-curdling tales of the wer-wolf, and corpses carried off by witches, are provided for another kind of taste.(784) A base product of Alexandria imitates the notes of the nightingale, and another, apparently of Jewish race, equally base, in torturing dissonant tones spouted passages from the Aeneid, profaned to scholarly ears by a mixture of Atellan verses.(785) Trimalchio, who was anxious that his wife should display her old powers of dancing a cancan, is also going to give an exhibition of his own gifts in the pantomimic line,(786) when the shrewd lady in a whisper warned him to maintain his dignity. How far she preserved her own we shall see presently.

The company at this strange party were worthy of their host. And Petronius has outdone himself in the description of these brother freedmen, looking up to Trimalchio as the glory of their order, and giving vent to their ill-humour, their optimism, or their inane moralities, in conversation with the sly observer who reports their talk. They are all old slaves like their host, men who have “made their pile,” or lost it. They rate themselves and their neighbours simply in terms of cash.(787) The only ability they can understand is that which can “pick money out of the dung-heap,” and “turn lead to gold.”(788) These gross and infinitely stupid fellows have not even the few saving traits in the character of Trimalchio. He has, after all, an honourable, though futile, ambition to be a wit, a connoisseur, a patron of learning. His luxury is coarse enough, but he wishes, however vainly, to redeem it by some ingenuity, by interspersing the mere animal feeding with some broken gleams, or, as we may think, faint and distorted reflections, of that great world of which he had heard, but the portals of which he could never enter. But his company are of mere clay. Trimalchio is gross enough at times, but, compared with his guests, he seems almost tolerable. And their dull baseness is the more torturing to a modern reader because it is an enduring type. The neighbour of the Greek observer warns him not to despise his company;(789) they are “warm” men. That one at the end of the couch, who began as a porter, has his HS.800,000. Another, an undertaker, has had his glorious days, when the wine flowed in rivers;(790) but he has been compelled to compound with his creditors, and he has played them a clever trick. A certain Seleucus, whose name reveals his origin, explains his objections to the bath, especially on this particular morning, when he has been at a funeral.(791) The fate of the departed friend unfortunately leads him to moralise on the weakness of mortal men, mere insects, or bubbles on the stream. As for medical aid, it is an imaginary comfort; it oftener kills than cures.(792) The great consolation was that the funeral was respectably done, although the wife was not effusive in her grief.(793) Another guest will have none of this affected mourning for one who lived the life of his choice and left his solid hundred thousand.(794) He was after all a harsh quarrelsome person, very different from his brother, a stout, kindly fellow with an open hand, and a sumptuous table. He had his reverses at first, but he was set up again by a good vintage and a lucky bequest, which he knew, by a sly stroke, how to increase; a true son of fortune, who lived his seventy years and more, as black as a crow, a man who lustily enjoyed all the delights of the flesh to the very end.(795)

But the most interesting person for the modern student is the grumbler about the management of town affairs, and here a page or two of the Satiricon is worth a dissertation. The price of bread has gone up, and the bakers must be in league with the aediles. In the good old times, when the critic first came from Asia, things were very different.(796) “There were giants in those days. Think of Safinius, who lived by the old arch, a man with a sharp, biting tongue, but a true friend, a man who, in the town council, went straight to his point, whose voice in the forum rang out like a trumpet. Yet he was just like one of us, knew everybody’s name, and returned every salute. Why, in those days corn was as cheap as dirt. You could buy for an as a loaf big enough for two. But the town has since gone sadly back.(797) Our aediles now think only how to pocket in a day what would be to some of us a fortune. I know how a certain person made his thousand gold pieces. If this goes on, I shall have to sell my cottages. Neither men nor the gods have any mercy. It all comes from our neglect of religion. No one now keeps a fast, no one cares a fig for Jove. In old days when there was a drought, the long-robed matrons with bare feet, dishevelled hair, and pure hearts, would ascend the hill to entreat Jupiter for rain, and then it would pour down in buckets.”(798) At this point the maundering, pious pessimist is interrupted by a rag dealer(799) of a more cheerful temper. “Now this, now that, as the rustic said, when he lost his speckled pig. What we have not to-day will come to-morrow; so life rubs along. Why, we are to have a three days’ show of gladiators on the next holiday, not of the common sort, but many freedmen among them. And our Titus has a high spirit; he will not do things by halves. He will give us cold steel without any shirking, a good bit of butchery in full view of the amphitheatre. And he can well afford it. His father died and left him HS.30,000,000. What is a paltry HS.400,000 to such a fortune?(800) and it will give him a name for ever. He has some tit-bits, too, in reserve, the lady chariot-driver, and the steward of Glyco, who was caught with his master’s wife; poor wretch, he was only obeying orders. And the worthless Glyco has given him to the beasts; the lady deserved to suffer. And I have an inkling that Mammaea is going to give us a feast, where we shall get two denarii apiece. If she does the part expected of her, Norbanus will be nowhere. His gladiators were a wretched, weedy, twopenny-halfpenny lot, who would go down at a mere breath. They were all cut to pieces, as the cowards deserved, at the call of the crowd, ‘give it them.’ A pretty show indeed! When I applauded, I gave far more than I got. But friend Agamemnon, you are thinking ‘what is all this long-winded chatter.’(801) Well, you, who dote on eloquence, why won’t you talk yourself, instead of laughing at us feeble folk. Some day I may persuade you to look in at my farm; I daresay, though the times are bad, we shall find a pullet to eat. And I have a young scholar ripening for your trade. He has good wits and never raises his head from his task. He paints with a will. He has begun Greek, and has a real taste for Latin. But one of his tutors is conceited and idle. The other is very painstaking, but, in his excess of zeal, he teaches more than he knows. So I have bought the boy some red-letter volumes, that he may get a tincture of law for domestic purposes. That is what gives bread and butter. He has now had enough of literature. If he gives it up, I think I shall teach him a trade, the barber’s or auctioneer’s or pleader’s,(802) something that only death can take from him. Every day I din into his ears, Primigenius, my boy, what you learn you learn for profit. Look at the lawyer Philero. If he had not learnt his business, he could not keep the wolf from the door. Why, only a little ago, he was a hawker with a bundle on his back, and now he can hold his own with Norbanus. Learning is a treasure, and a trade can never be lost.”

To all this stimulating talk there are lively interludes. A guest thinks one of the strangers, in a superior way, is making game of the company, and assails him with a shower of the choicest abuse, in malodorous Latin of the slums, interlarded with proud references to his own rise from the slave ranks.(803) Trimalchio orders the house-dog, Scylax, to be brought in, but the brute falls foul of a pet spaniel, and, in the uproar, a lamp is overthrown, the vases on the table are all smashed, and some of the guests are scalded with the hot oil.(804) In the middle of this lively scene, a lictor announces the approach of Habinnas, a stone-cutter, who is also a great dignitary of the town. He arrives rather elevated from another feast of which he has pleasant recollections. He courteously asks for Fortunata,(805) who happens to be just then looking after the plate and dividing the remains of the feast among the slaves. That lady, after many calls, appears in a cherry coloured tunic with a yellow girdle, wiping her hands with her neckerchief. She has splendid rings on her arms, legs, and fingers, which she pulls off to show them to the stone-cutter’s lady. Trimalchio is proud of their weight, and orders a balance to be brought in to confirm his assertions. It is melancholy to relate that, in the end, the two ladies get hopelessly drunk, and fall to embracing one another in a rather hysterical fashion. Fortunata even attempts to dance.(806) In the growing confusion the slaves take their places at table, and the cook begins to give imitations of a favourite actor,(807) and lays a wager with his master on the chances of the green at the next races. Trimalchio, who by this time was becoming very mellow and sentimental, determines to make his will, and to manumit all his slaves, with a farm to one, a house to another. He even gives his friend the stone-cutter full directions about the monument which is to record so brilliant a career. There is to be ample provision for its due keeping, in the fashion so well known from the inscriptions, with a fair space of prescribed measurements, planted with vines and other fruit trees. Trimalchio wishes to be comfortable in his last home.(808) On the face of the monument ships under full sail are to figure the sources of his wealth.(809) He himself is to be sculptured, seated on a tribunal, clothed with the praetexta of the Augustalis, with five rings on his fingers, ladling money from a bag, as in the great banquet with which he had once regaled the people.(810) On his right hand there is to be the figure of his wife holding a dove and a spaniel on a leash. A boy is to be graved weeping over a broken urn. And, finally, in the centre of the scene, there is to be a horologe, that the passer-by, as he looks for the hour, may have his eyes always drawn to the epitaph which recited the dignities and virtues of the illustrious freedman. It told posterity that “C. Pompeius Trimalchio Maecenatianus was pious, stout, and trusty, that he rose from nothing, left HS.30,000,000, and never heard a philosopher.” The whole company, along with Trimalchio himself, of course wept copiously at the mere thought of the close of so illustrious a career. After renewing their gastric energy in the bath, the company fell to another banquet. Presently a cock crows, and Trimalchio, in a fit of superstition, spills his wine under the table,(811) passes his rings to the right hand, and offers a reward to any one who will bring the ominous bird. The disturber was soon caught and handed over to the cook for execution. Then Trimalchio excites his wife’s natural anger by a piece of amatory grossness, and, in retaliation for her very vigorous abuse, flings a cup at her head. In the scene which follows he gives, with the foulest references to his wife’s early history, a sketch of his own career and the eulogy of the virtues that have made him what he is.(812) Growing more and more sentimental, he at last has himself laid out for dead;(813) the horn-blowers sound his last lament, one of them, the undertaker’s man, with such a good will, that the town watch arrived in breathless haste with water and axes to extinguish a fire. The strangers seized the opportunity to escape from the nauseous scene. Their taste raised them above Trimalchio’s circle, but they were quite on the level of its morals. Encolpius and his companions are soon involved in other adventures, in which it is better not to follow them.

The lesson of all this purse-proud ostentation and vulgarity, the moral which Petronius may have intended to point, is one which will be taught from age to age by descendants of Trimalchio, and which will be never learnt till a far off future. But we need not moralise, any more than Petronius. We have merely given some snatches of a work, which is now seldom read, because it throws a searching light on a class which was rising to power in Roman society. We have now seen the worst of that society, whether crushed by the tyranny of the Caesars, or corrupted and vulgarised by sudden elevation from ignominious poverty to wealth and luxury. But there were great numbers, both among the nobles and the masses, who, in that evil time, maintained the traditions of old Roman soberness and virtue. The three following chapters will reveal a different life from that which we have hitherto been describing.

Book II

RARA TEMPORUM FELICITAS