I. THE CIRCLE OF THE YOUNGER PLINY…

I. THE CIRCLE OF THE YOUNGER PLINY

It is a great relief to turn from the picture of base and vulgar luxury in the novel of Petronius to the sobriety and refinement of a class which has been elaborately painted by a less skilful artist, but a better man. The contrast between the pictures of Petronius and those of Pliny, of course, raises no difficulty. The writers belonged indeed to the same order, but they were describing two different worlds. The difficulty arises when we compare the high tone of the world which Pliny has immortalised, with the hideous revelations of contemporary licence in the same class which meet us in Juvenal, Martial, and Tacitus. And historical charity or optimism has often turned the contrast to account. But there is no need to pit the quiet testimony of Pliny against the fierce invective of Juvenal. Indeed to do so would indicate an imperfect insight into the character of the men and the associations which moulded their views of the society which surrounded them. The friends of Pliny were for the most part contemporaries of the objects of Juvenal’s wrath and loathing.(814) But although the two men lived side by side during the same years, and probably began to write for the public about the same date,(815) there is no hint that they ever met. They were socially at opposite poles; they were also as widely separated by temperament. Pliny was a charitable, good-natured man, an aristocrat, living among the élite, with an assured position and easy fortune—a man who, as he admits himself, was inclined to idealise his friends.(816) He probably shut his eyes to their moral faults, just as he felt bound in honour to extol their third-rate literary efforts. Juvenal was, as in a former chapter we have seen reason to believe, a soured and embittered man, who viewed the society of the great world only from a distance, and caught up the gossip of the servants’ hall. With the heat of an excitable temperament, he probably magnified what he heard, and he made whole classes responsible for the folly and intemperance of a few. Martial, the friend of Juvenal, lived in the same atmosphere, but, while Juvenal was inspired by a moral purpose, Martial caters, unabashed, for a prurient taste.(817) Both the charitable optimist and the gloomy, determined pessimist, by limiting their view, can find ample materials for their respective estimates of pagan society towards the end of the first century. A judicial criticism will combine or balance the opposing evidence rather than select the witnesses.

The truth is that society in every age presents the most startling moral contrasts, and no single comprehensive description of its moral condition can ever be true. This has been too often forgotten by those who have passed judgment on the moral state of Roman society, both in the first age of the Empire and in the last. That there was stupendous corruption and abnormal depravity under princes like Caligula, Nero, and Domitian, we hardly need the testimony of the satirists to induce us to believe. That there were large classes among whom virtuous instinct, and all the sober strength and gravity of the old Roman character, were still vigorous and untainted, is equally attested and equally certain. Ingenious immorality and the extravagance of luxury were no doubt rampant in the last century of the Republic and in the first century of the Empire, and their enormity has been heightened by the perverted and often prurient literary skill with which the orgies of voluptuous caprice have been painted to the last loathsome details. Yet even Ovid has a lingering ideal of womanly dignity which may repel, by refined reserve, the audacity of libertinism.(818) He was forced, by old-fashioned scruple or imperial displeasure, to make an elaborate apology for the lubricities of the Ars Amandi.(819) The most wanton writer of the evil days shrinks from justifying adultery, and hardly ever fails to respect the unconscious innocence of girlhood. In the days when, according to Juvenal, Roman matrons were eloping with gladiators, and visiting the slums of Rome, Tacitus and Favorinus were preaching the duties of a pure motherhood.(820) In the days when crowds were gloating over the obscenities of pantomime, and aristocratic dinner-parties were applauding the ribaldry of Alexandrian songs, Quintilian was denouncing the corruption of youth by the sight of their fathers toying with mistresses and minions.(821) In an age when matrons of noble rank were exposing themselves at the pleasure of an emperor, the philosopher Musonius was teaching that all indulgence, outside the sober limits of wedlock, was a gross, animal degradation of human dignity.(822) And it is thus we may balance Juvenal and Martial on the one side and Pliny on the other. The gloomy or prurient satirist gives us a picture of ideal baseness; the gentle and charitable aristocrat opens before us a society in which people are charmingly refined, and perhaps a little too good. Yet it is said with truth that an age should be judged by its ideals of goodness rather than by its moral aberrations. And certain it is that the age of Pliny and Tacitus and Quintilian had a high moral ideal, even though it was also the age of Domitian. The old Roman character, whatever pessimists, ancient or modern, may say, was a stubborn type, which propagated itself over all the West, and survived the Western Empire. It is safe to believe that there was in Italy and Gaul and Spain many a grand seigneur of honest, regular life, virtuous according to his lights, like Pliny’s uncle, or his Spurinna, or Verginius Rufus, or Corellius. There were certainly many wedded lives as pure and self-sacrificing as those of the elder Arria and Caecina Paetus, or of Calpurnia and Pliny.(823) There were homes like those at Fréjus,(824) or Como, or Brescia,(825) in which boys and girls were reared in a refined and severe simplicity, which even improved upon the tradition of the golden age of Rome. And, as will be seen in a later chapter, many a brief stone record remains which shows that, even in the world of slaves and freedmen, there were always in the darkest days crowds of humble people, with honest, homely ideals, and virtuous family affection, proud of their industries, and sustaining one another by help and kindness.

In this sounder class of Roman society, it will be found that the saving or renovating power was, not so much any religious or philosophic impulse, as the wholesome influence, which never fails from age to age, of family duty and affection, reinforced, especially in the higher ranks, by a long tradition of Roman dignity and self-respect, and by the simple cleanness and the pieties of country life. The life of the blameless circle of aristocrats which Pliny determined to preserve for the eyes of posterity, seems to be sometimes regarded as the result of a sudden transformation, a rebound from the frantic excesses of the time of the Claudian Caesars to the simpler and severer mode of life of which Vespasian set a powerful example. That there was such a change of moral tone, especially in the class surrounding the court, partly caused by financial exhaustion, partly by the introduction of new men from the provinces into the ranks of the Senate, is certified by the supreme authority of Tacitus.(826) Yet we should remember that men like Agricola, the father-in-law of Tacitus, or Verginius Rufus, or Fabatus, the grandfather of Pliny’s wife, or the elder Pliny, and many another, were not converted prodigals. They knew how to reconcile, by quietude or politic deference, the dignity of Roman virtue with a discreet acquiescence even in the excesses of despotism. The fortunes of many of them remained unimpaired. The daily life of men like the elder Pliny and Spurinna, is distinguished by a virtuous calm, an almost painful monotony of habit, in which there seems to have been nothing to reform except, perhaps, a certain moral rigidity.(827) Above all, and surely it is the most certain proof and source of the moral soundness of any age, the ideal of womanhood was still high, and it was even then not seldom realised. There may have been many who justified the complaint of moralists that mothers did not guard with vigilant care the purity of their children. But there were women of the circle of Tacitus and Pliny as spotless as the half-legendary Lucretia, as they were far more accomplished, and probably far more charming. It is often said that women sink or rise according to the level of the men with whom they are linked. If that be true, there must have been many good men in the days of the Flavian dynasty.

The younger Pliny, whose name, before his adoption, was Publius Caecilius Secundus,(828) was descended from families which had been settled at Como since the time of the first Caesar.(829) They belonged to the local aristocracy, and possessed estates and villas around the lake. Pliny’s father, who had held high municipal office, died early, but the boy had the great advantage of the guardianship of Verginius Rufus, for whose character and achievements his ward felt the profoundest reverence.(830) That great soldier had been governor of Upper Germany at the close of Nero’s reign, and, with a deference to old constitutional principles, which Pliny must have admired, had twice, at the peril of his life, refused to receive the imperial place at the hands of his clamorous legions.(831) Pliny was born in 61 or 62 A.D., the time which saw the death of Burrus, the retirement of Seneca from public life, and the marriage of Nero with Poppaea.(832) His infancy therefore coincided with the last and wildest excesses of the Neronian tyranny. But country places like Como felt but little of the shock of these moral earthquakes. There was no school in Como till one was founded by Pliny’s own generosity.(833) But the boy had probably, in his early years, the care of his uncle, the author of the Natural History, who, during the worst years of the Terror, was living, like many others, in studious retirement on his estates.(834) The uncle and nephew were men of very different temperament, but there can be little doubt that the character and habits of the older man profoundly influenced the ideals of the younger. The elder Pliny would have been an extraordinary character even in a puritan age; he seems almost a miracle in the age of the Claudian Caesars. He was born in 23 A.D., in the reign of Tiberius; and his early youth and manhood cover the reigns of Caligula and Claudius. He was only 32 when Nero came to the throne. He returned to Rome in 71 to hold a high place in the councils of Vespasian.(835) That more than monastic asceticism, that jealous hoarding of every moment,(836) that complete indifference to ordinary pleasures, in comparison with the duty, or the ambition, of transmitting to future ages the accumulations of learned toil, is a curious contrast to the Gargantuan feasts or histrionic aestheticism which were the fashion in the circle of the Claudian Emperors. The younger Pliny has left us a minute account of his uncle’s routine of life, and justly adds that the most intense literary toil might seem mere idleness in comparison.(837) His studies often began soon after midnight, broken by an official visit to the emperor before dawn. After administrative work was over, the remainder of the day was spent in reading or writing. Even in the bath or on a journey, this literary industry was never interrupted. A reader or amanuensis was always at hand to save the moments that generally are allowed to slip away to waste. He tells Titus in his preface that he had consulted 2000 volumes for his Natural History.(838) The 160 volumes of closely written notes, which the austere enthusiast could have sold once for £3500, might have challenged the industry of a Casaubon or a Mommsen.

The laborious intensity of the elder Pliny was probably unrivalled in his day. But the moral tone, the severe self-restraint, the contempt for the sensual, or even the comfortable, side of life, the plain unspeculative stoicism, was a tone which, from many indications in the younger Pliny and in the other literature of the time, appears to have been not so rare as the reader of Juvenal or Martial might suspect. A book like the Caesars of Suetonius, concentrating attention on the life of the emperor and his immediate circle, is apt to suggest misleading conclusions as to the condition of society at large. The old Roman character, perhaps the strongest and toughest national character ever developed, was an enduring type, and its true home was in the atmosphere of quiet country places in northern or central Italy, where the round of rural labour and simple pleasures reproduced the environment in which it first took form. We have glimpses of many of these nurseries or retreats of old-fashioned virtue in Pliny’s Letters. Brescia and Padua, in the valley of the Po, were especially noted for frugality and severity.(839) And it was from among the youth of Brescia that Pliny suggested a husband for the daughter of the stoic champion, Arulenus Rusticus. There must have been many a home, like those of Spurinna, or Corellius Rufus, or Fabatus,(840) or the poet Persius, where, far from the weary conventionality of the capital, the rage for wealth, the rush of vulgar self-assertion, there reigned the tranquil and austere ideal of a life dedicated to higher ends than the lusts of the flesh, or the ghoul-like avarice that haunted death-beds. There are youths and maidens in the portrait-gallery of Pliny whose innocence was guarded by good women as pure and strong as those matrons who nursed the stern, unbending soldiers of the Samnite and Punic wars.(841)

The great struggle in which the legions of the East and West met again, and yet again, in the valley of the Po, probably did not much disturb the quiet homes on lake Como. The close of that awful conflict gave the world ten years of quiet and reformation, which were a genial atmosphere for the formation of many characters like Pliny’s. The reign of the Flavians was ushered in by the mystery and glamour of Eastern superstition, by oracles on Mount Carmel and miracles at Alexandria.(842) But the plain Sabine soldier, who was the saviour of the Roman State, brought to his momentous task a clear unsophisticated good sense, with no trace of that crapulous excitement which had alternated between the heroics of spurious art and the lowest bohemianism. Vespasian, although he was not a figure to strike the imagination, was yet, if we think of the abyss from which, by his single strength, he rescued the Rome world,(843) undoubtedly one of the greatest of the emperors. And his biographer, with an unusual tact, suggests what was probably one secret of his strength. Vespasian regularly visited the old farmhouse at Reate which was the cradle of his race. Nothing in the old place was ever changed. And, on holidays and anniversaries the emperor never failed to drink from the old silver goblet which his grandmother had used.(844) The strength and virtue of the Latin race lay, not in religion or philosophy, but in the family pieties and devotion to the State. Vespasian found it urgent to bring order into the national finances, which had been reduced to chaos by the wild extravagance of his predecessors, and to recruit the Senate, which had been more than decimated by proscription, confiscation, and vicious self-abandonment.(845) In performing his task, he did not shrink from the charge of cheese-paring, just as he did not dread the unpopularity of fresh taxation.(846) But he could be liberal as well as parsimonious. He restored many of the ancient temples, even in country places.(847) He made grants to senators whose fortunes had decayed or had been wasted.(848) He spent great sums on colossal buildings and on amusements for the people.(849) But the most singular and interesting trait in this remarkable man is that, with no pretensions to literary or artistic culture, he was the first Caesar who gave a fixed endowment to professors of the liberal arts, and that he was the founder of that public system of education(850) which, for good or evil, produced profound effects on Roman character and intellect down to the end of the Western Empire. His motive was not, as some have suggested, to bring literature into thraldom to the State. He was really making himself the organ of a great intellectual movement. For, while the vast field of administration absorbed much of the energy of the cultivated class, the decay of free institutions had left a great number with only a shadow of political interest, and the mass of unoccupied talent had to find some other scope for its energies. It found it for ages, till the end of the Western Empire, in fugitive and ephemeral composition, or in the more ephemeral displays of the rhetorical class-room.(851) Vespasian perhaps did a greater service in renovating the upper class of Rome by the introduction of many new men from the provinces, to fill the yawning gaps in senatorial and equestrian ranks. Spain contributed more than its fair share to the literature and statesmanship of this period.(852) And one of the best and most distinguished sons of that province who found a career at Rome, was the rhetor Quintilian.

The young Pliny, under his uncle’s care, probably came to Rome not long after Quintilian entered on his career of twenty years, as a teacher of rhetoric.(853) While the elder Pliny was one of Vespasian’s trusted advisers, and regularly visited the emperor on official business before dawn, his nephew was forming his taste and character under the greatest and best of Roman teachers. Quintilian left a deep impression on the younger Pliny.(854) He made him a Ciceronian, and he fortified his character. The master was one who believed that, in education, moral influence and environment are even more important than intellectual stimulus. He deplores the moral risks to which the careless, self-indulgent parent, or the corrupt tutor, may expose a boy in the years when the destiny of a life is decided for better or worse. Intellectual ambition is good. But no brilliancy of intellect will compensate for the loss of the pure ingenuous peace of boyhood. This is the faith of Quintilian, and it was also the faith of his pupil.(855) And it may be that the teaching of Quintilian had a larger share in forming the moral ideals of the Antonine age in the higher ranks than many more definitely philosophic guides, whose practice did not always conform to their doctrine.

Quintilian’s first principle is that the orator must be a good man in the highest and widest sense, and, although he will not refuse to borrow from the philosophical schools, he yet boldly asserts the independence of the oratorical art in moulding the character of the man who, as statesman or advocate, will have constantly to appeal to moral principles.(856) This tone, combined with his own high example of seriousness, honour, and the purest domestic attachment,(857) must have had a powerful effect on the flower of the Roman youth, who were his pupils for nearly a generation. There are none of his circle whose virtues Pliny extols more highly than the men who had sat with him on the same benches, and who accompanied or followed one another in the career of public office. One of the dearest of these youthful friends was Voconius Romanus, who, besides being a learned pleader, with a keen and subtle intellect, was gifted with a singular social charm and sweetness of manner.(858) Another was Cornutus Tertullus, who was bound to Pliny by closer ties of sympathy than any of his friends, and for whose purity of character he had a boundless admiration. They were also united in the love and friendship of the best people of the time.(859) They were official colleagues in the consulship, and in the prefecture of the treasury of Saturn. For another academic friend, Julius Naso, who had been his loyal supporter in all his work and literary ambitions, he earnestly begs the aid of Fundanus, to secure him official advancement.(860) Calestrius Tiro, who rose to be proconsul of the province of Baetica, must be included in this select company. He had served with Pliny in the army of Syria, and had been his colleague in the quaestorship; they constantly visited one another at their country seats.(861) Such men, linked to one another by memories of boyhood and by the cares of the same official career, must have been a powerful and salutary element in social and political life at the opening of the Antonine age.

It is a curious thing that, while Pliny lived in the closest friendship with the Stoic opposition of Domitian’s reign, and has unbounded reverence for its canonised saints, as we may call them, he shows few traces of any real interest in speculative philosophy. Indeed, in one passage he confesses that on such subjects he speaks as an amateur.(862) He probably thought, like his friend Tacitus, that philosophy was a thing to be taken in moderation by the true Roman. It was when he was serving on the staff in Asia that he formed a close friendship with Artemidorus, whom Musonius chose for his daughter’s hand.(863) Pliny has not a word to say of his opinions, but he extols his simplicity and genuineness—qualities, he adds, which you rarely find in the other philosophers of the day. It was at the same time that he formed a friendship with the Stoic Euphrates. That philosopher, who is so studiously maligned by Philostratus, was a heroic figure in Pliny’s eyes.(864) But what Pliny admires in him is not so much his philosophy, as his grave ornate style, his pure character, which showed none of that harsh and ostentatious severity which was then so common in his class. Euphrates is a polished gentleman after Pliny’s own heart, tall and stately, with flowing hair and beard, a man who excites reverence but not fear, stern to vice, but gentle to the sinner. Pliny seems to have set little store by the formal preaching of philosophy. In a letter on the uses of sickness, he maintains that the moral lessons of the sick-bed are worth many formal disquisitions on virtue.(865)

Yet this man, apparently without the slightest taste for philosophic inquiry, or even for the homilies which, in his day, had taken the place of real speculation, had a profound veneration for the Stoic martyrs, and, true gentleman as he was, he risked his life in the times of the last Terror to befriend them. It needed both nerve and dexterity to be the friend of philosophers in those days. In that perilous year, 93 A.D., when Pliny was praetor,(866) the philosophers were banished from the city. Yet the praetor visited Artemidorus in his suburban retreat, and, with his wonted generosity, he helped the philosopher to wipe out a heavy debt which he had contracted. One of Pliny’s dearest friends was Junius Mauricus, the brother of Arulenus Rusticus, who had been put to death by Domitian for writing a eulogy on Thrasea the Stoic saint, the champion of the higher life in Nero’s reign.(867) Junius Mauricus afterwards suffered exile himself in the same cause. He had charged himself with the care of his martyred brother’s children, and Pliny helped him to find a worthy husband for the daughter of Rusticus.(868) With Fannia the widow of Helvidius, and the daughter of Thrasea, Pliny’s intimacy seems to have been of the closest kind. From her he heard the tales, now too well worn, of the fierce firmness of the elder Arria in nerving her husband Paetus for death, and of her own determined self-immolation.(869) The mother of Fannia, the younger Arria, when Thrasea her husband was condemned to die in the reign of Nero, was only prevented from sharing his fate by the most earnest entreaties of her friends.(870) Fannia had followed Helvidius into exile in Nero’s reign,(871) and again under Vespasian, when the philosopher, with a petulance very unlike the reserve of Thrasea, brought his fate upon himself by an insulting disregard of the emperor’s dignity as first magistrate of the State, if not by revolutionary tendencies.(872) Fannia seems to have inherited many of the great qualities of her father Thrasea, the noblest and the wisest member of the Stoic opposition. He sprang from a district in Lombardy which was noted for its soundness and gravity of character. Unlike Paetus(873) and Helvidius, he never defied or intrigued against the emperor, even when the emperor was a Nero. And, though he belonged to the austere circle of Persius, he did not disdain to sing in tragic costume, at a festival of immemorial antiquity, in his native Patavium.(874) He performed his duties as senator with firm dignity, and yet with cautious tact. His worst political crime, and that which proved his ruin, was a severe reserve and a refusal to join in the shameful adulation of the matricide prince. He would not stoop to vote divine honours to the adulteress Poppaea, and for three years he absented himself from the Senate-house.(875) Yet, when the end came, he would not allow the fiery Arulenus Rusticus to imperil his future, by interposing his veto as tribune.(876) His daughter Fannia was worthy of her illustrious descent. She showed all the fearless defiance of the elder Arria, when she boldly admitted that she had asked Senecio to write her husband’s life, and she uttered no word to deprecate her doom. When all her property was confiscated, she carried the dangerous volume with her to her place of exile.(877) Yet this stern heroine had also the tenderer virtues. She nursed her kinswoman Junia, one of the Vestals, through a dangerous fever, and caught the seeds of her own death from her charge. With all her masculine firmness and courage, she had a sweetness and charm which made her not less loved than venerated. With her may be said to have expired the peculiar tradition of a circle which, for three generations, and during the reigns of eight emperors, guarded, sometimes with dangerous defiance, the old ideal of uncompromising virtue in the face of a brutal and vulgar materialism. It was the tradition which inspired the austere detachment of the poetry of Persius, with its dim solemnity and obscure depths, as of a sacred grove. These people were hard and stern to vicious power,(878) like our own Puritans of the seventeenth century. Like them too, they were exclusive and defiant, with the cold hauteur of a moral aristocracy, a company of the elect, who would not even parley with evil, for whom the issues of life and death were the only realities in a world hypnotised by the cult of the senses and the spell of tyranny. Their intense seriousness was a religion, although they had only the vaguest and most arid conception of God, and the dimmest and least comforting conception of any future life. They seemed to perish as a little sect of troublesome visionaries; and yet their spirit lived on, softened and sweetened, and passed into the great rulers of the Antonine age.

Before his formal period of military service as tribune of the 3rd Gallic legion in Syria, Pliny had, in his nineteenth year, entered on that forensic career which was perhaps the greatest pride of his life.(879) He practised in the Centumviral court, which was chiefly occupied with questions of property and succession. Occasionally he speaks with a certain weariness of the trivial character of the cases in which he was engaged. But his general estimate is very different. The court is to him an arena worthy of the greatest talent and industry,(880) and the successful pleader may win a fame which may entitle him to take rank with the great orators of the past. Pliny, inspired by memories of Quintilian’s lectures, has always floating before him the glory of Cicero.(881) He will prepare for publication a speech delivered in an obscure case about a disputed will.(882) He is immensely proud of its subtlety and point, and the sweep of its indignant or pathetic declamation, and he is not unwilling to believe his legal friends who compared it with the De Corona! The suppression of free political life, the absence of public interests, and the extinction of the trade of the delator, left young men with a passion for distinction few chances of gratifying it. The law courts at any rate provided an audience, and the chance of momentary prominence. In the Letters of Pliny, we can see the young advocate pushing his way through the dense masses of the crowded court, arriving at his place with torn tunic, holding the attention of his audience for seven long hours, and sitting down amid the applause even of the judges themselves.(883) Calpurnia often arranged relays of messengers to bring her news of the success, from point to point, of one of her husband’s speeches.(884) Youths of the highest social rank—a Salinator, or a Ummidius Quadratus—threw themselves eagerly into the drudgery which might make an ephemeral name.(885) Ambitious pretenders, with no talent or learning, and arrayed perhaps in hired purple and jewels, like Juvenal’s needy lawyer, forced themselves on to the benches of the advocates, and engaged a body of claqueurs whose applause was purchased for a few denarii.(886) Pliny has such a pride in this profession, he so idealises what must have been often rather humdrum work, that he feels a personal pain at anything which seems to detract from the old-fashioned, leisurely dignity of the court. In his day the judges seem to have been becoming more rapid and business-like in their procedure, and less inclined to allow the many clepsydrae which men of Pliny’s school demanded for the gradual development of all their rhetorical artifices. He regrets the good old times, when adjournments were freely granted,(887) and days would be spent on a case which was now despatched in as many hours. It is for this reason that he cannot conceal a certain admiration for Regulus, in other respects, “the most detestable of bipeds” but who redeemed his infamy by an enthusiasm and energy as an advocate which rivalled even that of Pliny.

M. Aquilius Regulus, the prince of delators, and one of the great glories of the Roman bar in Domitian’s reign, is a singular figure. His career and character are a curious illustration of the social history of the times. Regulus was the son of a man who, in Nero’s reign, had been driven into exile and ruined.(888) Bold, able, recklessly eager for wealth and notoriety at any cost, as a mere youth he resolved to raise himself from obscure indigence, and soon became one of the most capable and dreaded agents of the tyranny. He gained an evil fame by the ruin of the great houses of the Crassi and Orfiti. Lust of blood and greed of gain drove him on to the wholesale destruction of innocent boys, noble matrons, and men of the most illustrious race. The cruelty of Nero was not swift enough to satisfy him, and he called for the annihilation of the Senate at a stroke. He rose rapidly to great wealth, honours were showered upon him, and, after a prudent retirement in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, he reached the pinnacle of his depraved ambition under Vespasian’s cruel son. He figures more than once in the poems of Martial, and always in the most favourable light. His talent and eloquence, according to the poet, were only equalled by his piety, and the special care of the gods had saved him from being buried under the ruins of a cloister which had suddenly fallen in.(889) He had estates at Tusculum, in Umbria and Etruria.(890) The courts were packed when he rose to plead.(891) Unfortunately, the needy poet furnishes a certain key to all this flattery, when he thanks Regulus for his presents, and then begs him to buy them back.(892) It is after Domitian’s death that we meet Regulus in Pliny’s pages. The times are changed, the delator’s day is over, and Regulus is a humbler man. But he is still rich, courted, and feared; he is still a great power in the law courts. With a weak voice, a bad memory, and hesitating utterance,(893) by sheer industry and determination he had made himself a powerful speaker, with a style of his own, sharp, pungent, brutally incisive, ruthlessly sacrificing elegance to point.(894) He belonged to the new school, and sometimes sneered at Pliny’s affectation of the grand Ciceronian manner.(895) Yet to Pliny’s eyes, his earnest strenuousness in his profession redeems some of his vices. He insists on having ample time to develop his case.(896) He appears in the morning pale with study, wearing a white patch on his forehead. He has consulted the diviners as to the success of his pleadings.(897) It is a curious sign of the times that this great advocate, who already possessed an enormous fortune, was a legacy-hunter of the meanest sort. He actually visited, on her death-bed, Verania, the widow of that Piso, the adopted son of Galba, over whose murder Regulus had savagely gloated, and by telling her that the stars promised a hope of recovery, he obtained a place in her will. His mourning for his son displayed all the feverish extravagance and grandiose eccentricity of a true child of the Neronian age.(898) The boy’s ponies and dogs and pet birds were slaughtered over his pyre. Countless pictures and statues of him were ordered. His memoir was read by the father to a crowded audience, and a thousand copies of it were sent broadcast over the provinces.(899) In Regulus we seem to see the type of character which, had fortune raised him to the throne, would have made perhaps a saner Caligula, and an even more eccentric Nero.

The struggles of the law courts were idealised by Pliny, and their transient triumphs seemed to him to match the glory of the Philippics or the Verrines. Yet, to do him justice, Pliny had sometimes a truer idea of the foundations of lasting fame. The secret of immortality, the one chance of escaping oblivion, is to leave your thought embalmed in choice and distinguished literary form, which coming ages will not willingly let die.(900) This, probably the only form of immortality in which Pliny believed, is the great motive for literary labour. The longing to be remembered was the most ardent passion of the Roman mind in all ages and in all ranks, from the author of the Agricola to the petty artisan, who commemorated the homely virtues of his wife for the eyes of a distant age, and made provision for the annual feast and the tribute of roses to the tomb. Of that immense literary ambition which Pliny represented, and which he considered it a duty to foster, only a small part has reached its goal. The great mass of these eager litterateurs have altogether vanished, or remain as mere shadowy names in Martial or Statius or Pliny.

The poems of Martial and Statius leave the impression that, in the reign of Domitian, the interest in poetical literature was keen and widely diffused, and that, besides the poets by profession, there were crowds of amateurs who dabbled in verse. The Silvae transport us into a charming, if rather luxurious world, where men like Atedius Melior or Pollius amuse themselves with dilettante composition among their gardens and marbles on the bays of Campania.(901) Martial has a host of friends similarly engaged, and the versatility of some of them is suspiciously wide. An old Ardelio is twitted by Martial with his showy and superficial displays in declamation and history, in plays and epigrams, in grammar and astronomy.(902) Canius Rufus, his countryman from Gades, Varro, Bassus, Brutianus, Cirinius, have all an extraordinary dexterity in almost every branch of poetical composition. Martial is too keen a critic not to see the fugitive character of much of this amateur literature. Like Juvenal, he scoffs at the thin talent which concealed its feebleness behind the pomp and faded splendour of epic or tragic tradition.(903) He roughly tells the whole versifying crowd that genius alone will live in coming ages. The purchased applause of the recitation hall merely gratifies for an hour the vanity of the literary trifler. It is a pity for his fame that Martial did not always maintain this tone of sincerity. He can at times sell his flattery to the basest and most stupid. He is capable of implying a comparison of the frigid pedantry of Silius Italicus to the majesty of Virgil.(904)

Pliny was a friend and admirer of Martial, and, with his usual generous hand, he made the poet a present when he left Rome for ever to pass his last years at Bilbilis.(905) The needy epigrammatist was only a distant observer, or hanger-on of that world of wealth and refinement in which Pliny was a conspicuous figure. But from both Pliny and Martial we get very much the same impression of the literary movement in the reign of Domitian. Pliny himself is perhaps its best representative. He is a true son of the Roman schools, as they had been revived and strengthened by Vespasian, for a life of many generations. Pliny does not think slightly of the literary efforts of his own day: some of them he even overrates. But already the Roman mind had bent its neck to that thraldom to the past, to that routine of rhetorical discipline, which, along with other causes, produced the combination of ambitious effort and mediocre performance that, for the last three centuries of the Empire, is the characteristic of all literary culture. From his great teacher Quintilian Pliny had imbibed a profound reverence for Cicero.(906) Alike in his career of honours and his literary pursuits, he loves to think that he is treading in the great orator’s footsteps. In answer to a taunt of Regulus, he once boldly avowed his preference for the Ciceronian oratory to that of his own day. Demosthenes is also sometimes his model, though he feels keenly the difference that separates them.(907) Indeed his reverence for Greece as the mother of letters, art, and civic life was one of Pliny’s sincerest and most honourable feelings. To a man who had been appointed to high office in Greece he preaches, in earnest tones, the duty of reverence for that gifted race whose age was consecrated by the memories of its glorious prime.(908) Pliny’s Greek studies must have begun very early. At the age of fourteen he had written a Greek tragedy, for which, however, he modestly does not claim much merit.(909) He had always a certain taste for poetry, but it seems to have been merely the taste created or enforced by the constant study of the poets under the grammarian. Once, while detained by bad weather on his way back from military service in Asia, he amused himself with composing in elegiac and heroic verse.(910) Later in his career, he published a volume of poems in hendecasyllabic metre, written on various occasions. But there was no inspiration behind these conventional exercises. He was chiefly moved to write in verse, as he naïvely confesses, by the example of the great orators who beguiled their leisure in this way. Among his published poems there were some with a flavour of Catullan lubricity, which offended or astonished some of his severer friends, who thought such doubtful lightness unworthy of a grave character and a great position.(911) No better illustration could be found of Pliny’s incorrigible conventionality in such things than the defence which he makes of his suspected verses to Titius Ariston.(912) It is to Pliny not a question of morals or propriety. The ancient models are to be followed, not only in their elevated, but in their looser moods. The case seems to be closed when Pliny can point to similar literary aberrations in a long line of great men from Varro and Virgil and Cicero to Verginius Rufus and the divine Nerva.(913)

Pliny, however, though vain of his dexterity in these trifles, probably did not rate them very highly. It was to oratorical fame that his ambition was directed. He was dissatisfied with the eloquence of his own day, which, to use the words of Regulus, sprang at the throat of its subject, and he avowed himself an imitator of Cicero. His speeches, even for the centumviral court, were worked up with infinite care, although with too self-conscious an aim to impress an audience. We can hardly imagine Cicero or Demosthenes coldly balancing their tropes and figures after the fashion of Pliny. When the great oratorical effort was over, the labour was renewed, in order to make the speech worthy of the eyes of posterity. It was revised and polished, and submitted to the scrutiny of critical readers for suggestions of emendation.(914) Pliny was probably the first to give readings of speeches to long-suffering friends. We hear with a shudder that the recital of the Panegyric was spread over three days!(915) The other speeches on which Pliny lavished so much labour and thought, have perished, as they probably deserved to perish. The Panegyric was preserved, and became the parent and model of the prostituted rhetoric of the Gallic renaissance in the fourth century.(916) Pliny was by no means a despicable literary critic, when he was not paying the tribute of friendly flattery which social tyranny then exacted. He could sometimes be honestly reserved in his appreciation of a friend’s dull literary efforts.(917) But in his ideals of oratory, he seems to be hopelessly wrong. There are some terse and epigrammatic sentences in the Panegyric, which redeem it by their strong sincerity. But Pliny’s canons of oratorical style would have excited the ridicule of his great models, who were thinking of their goal, and not measuring every pace as they strained towards it. Pliny’s theory that the mere length of a speech is a great element in its excellence, that swift directness is inartistic, that lingering diffuseness is an oratorical charm, that laboured manufacture of turgid phrases may produce the effect of the impetuous rush of Demosthenes and Cicero in their moments of inspiration, makes us rather glad, who love him, that we have not more of Pliny’s oratory.(918)

It is by his letters that Pliny has lived, and will live on, so long as men care to know the inner life of the great ages that have gone before. The criticism, which is so quick to seize the obvious weaknesses of the author of a priceless picture of ancient society, seems to be a little ungrateful. We could forgive almost any failing or affectation in one who had left us a similar revelation of society when M. Aurelius was holding back the Germans on the Danube, or when Probus was shattering the invaders of the third century. The letters of Cicero offer an apparently obvious comparison, which may be used to the detriment of Pliny. Yet the comparison is rather inept. Cicero was a man of affairs in the thick of a great revolution, and his letters are invaluable to the student of politics at a great crisis in history. But in the calm of Trajan’s reign, a letter-writer had to seek other subjects of interest than the fortunes of the state. Literature, criticism, the beauties of nature, the simple charm of country life, the thousand trivial incidents and eccentricities of an over-ripe society in the capital of the world, furnished a ready pen and a genial imagination, which could idealise its surroundings, with ample materials. Pliny is by some treated as a mediocrity; but, like our own Horace Walpole, he had the keen sense to see that social routine could be made interesting, and that the man who had the skill to do so might make himself famous. He was genuinely interested in his social environment. And intense interest in one’s subject is one great secret of literary success. Pliny had also the instinct that, if a work is to live, it must have a select distinction of style, which may be criticised, but which cannot be ignored. He had the laudable ambition to put his thoughts in a form of artistic grace which may make even commonplace attractive. So good a judge as the late Mr. Paley did not hesitate to put the Latinity of Pliny on the level of that of Cicero. Pliny’s Letters, perhaps even more than the masterpieces of the Augustine age, fascinated the taste of the fourth and fifth centuries. They were the models of Symmachus and Sidonius, who tried, but in very different fashion, to do for their age what Pliny did for his.(919)

Like his imitators, Sidonius and Symmachus, Pliny intended his Letters to go down to the future as a masterpiece of style, and as a picture of his age. We know that the letters of Symmachus were carefully preserved in duplicate by his scribes, probably by his own instructions, although they were edited and published by his son only after his death.(920) Pliny, like Sidonius, gave his Letters to the public in successive portions during his life.(921) Like Sidonius too, he felt that he had not the sustained power to write a consecutive history of his time and the Letters of both are probably far more valuable. Pliny’s first book opens with a kind of dedication to Septicius Clarus, who was the patron of Suetonius, and who rose to be praetorian prefect under Hadrian.(922) Pliny appears to disclaim any order or principle of arrangement in these books, but this is the device of an artistic negligence. Yet it has been proved by the prince of European scholars in our day that both as to date and subject matter, Pliny’s Letters reveal signs of the most careful arrangement. The books were published separately, a common practice down to the end of Roman literary history. The same subject reappears in the same book or the next.(923) Groups of letters dealing with the same matter are found in their natural order in successive books. The proof is made even clearer by the silence or the express references to Pliny’s family relations. Finally, the older men, who fill the stage in the earlier Letters, disappear towards the end; while a younger generation, a Salinator or a Ummidius Quadratus, are only heard of in the later. Men of Pliny’s own age, like Tacitus or Cornutus Tertullus, meet us from first to last. The dates at which the various books were published have been fixed with tolerable certainty. It is enough for our present purpose to say that the earliest letter belongs to the reign of Nerva, and the ninth book was probably given to the world a year or two before the writer was appointed by Trajan to the office of imperial legate of Bithynia.(924)

It is easy, as we have said, and apparently congenial to some writers, to dwell on the vanity and self-complacency of the writer of these letters. By some he seems to be regarded chiefly as a poseur. To discover the weaknesses of Pliny is no great feat of criticism: they are on the surface. But “securus judicat orbis terrarum,” and Pliny has borne the scrutiny of the great judge. Men of his own race and age, who spoke and wrote the most finished Latin, awarded him the palm of exquisite style. But Pliny has many qualities of the heart, which should cover a multitude of sins, even more serious than any with which he is charged. He had the great gift of loyal friendship, and he had its usual reward in a multitude of friends. It has been regretted that Pliny does not deal with serious questions of politics and philosophy, that his Letters rather skim the surface of social life, and leave its deeper problems untouched. Pliny himself would probably have accepted this criticism as a compliment. The mass of men are little occupied with insoluble questions. And Pliny has probably deserved better of posterity by leaving us a vivid picture of the ordinary life of his time or of his class, rather than an analysis of its spiritual distresses and maladies. We have enough of that in Seneca, in M. Aurelius, and in Lucian. Of the variety and vividness of Pliny’s sketches of social life there can never be any question. But our gratitude will be increased if we compare his Letters with the collections of his imitators, Symmachus and Sidonius, whose arid pages are seldom turned by any but a few curious and weary students. Martial, in his way, is perhaps even more clear-cut and minute in his portraiture. But Martial is essentially a wit of the town, viewing its vices, follies, and fashions with the eye of a keen, but rather detached observer. In reading Pliny’s Letters, we feel ourselves introduced into the heart of that society in its better hours; and, above all, we seem to be transported to those quiet provincial towns and secluded country seats where, if life was duller and tamer than it was in the capital, the days passed in a quiet content, unsolicited by the stormier passions, in orderly refinement, in kindly relations with country neighbours, and amid the unfading charm of old-world pieties and the witchery of nature.

Pliny has also done a great service in preserving a memorial of the literary tone and habits of his time. Even in that age of fertile production and too enthusiastic appreciation, Pliny, like Seneca and Statius, has a feeling that the love for things of the mind was waning.(925) And he deemed it an almost religious duty, as Symmachus and Sidonius did more than three centuries after him, to arouse the flagging interest in letters, and to reward even third-rate literary effort with exuberant praise. He avows that it is a matter of duty to admire and venerate any performance in a field so difficult as that of letters.(926) Yet Pliny was not by any means devoid of critical honesty and acumen. He could be a severe judge of his own style. He expects candid criticism from his friends, and receives it with gratitude and good temper.(927) This is to him, indeed, the practical purpose of readings before final publication. He made emendations and excisions in the Histories of Tacitus, which the great author had submitted for his revision.(928) In his correspondence with Tacitus, there is a curious mixture of vanity along with a clear recognition of his friend’s immense superiority of genius, and a sure prescience of his immortal fame. He is proud to hear their names coupled as chiefs of contemporary literature,(929) and he cherishes the hope that, united by loyal friendship in life, they will go down together to a remote future. When, in the year 106, Tacitus had asked him for an account of the elder Pliny’s death, in the great eruption of Vesuvius, Pliny expressed a firm belief that the book on which Tacitus was then engaged was destined to an enduring fame.(930) He was not quite so confident as to the immortality of Martial’s work,(931) although he appreciates to the full Martial’s brilliant and pungent wit. On the other hand, writing to a friend about the death of Silius Italicus, he frankly recognises that the Epic of the Punic War is a work of industry rather than of genius.(932) Yet he cannot allow the author of this dull mechanical poem to pass away without some record of his career.(933) The death at seventy-five of the last surviving consular of the Neronian age, of the consul in whose year of office the tyranny of Nero closed, inspired a feeling of pathos which was probably genuine, in spite of the rather pompous and pedantic expression of it. And although he wrote the Punica, a work which was almost buried till the fifteenth century,(934) Silius was probably a not uninteresting person. He had been a delator under Nero, and had enjoyed the friendship of Vitellius, but he knew how to redeem his character under the Flavian dynasty, and he had filled the proconsulate of Asia with some credit.(935) Henceforth he enjoyed the lettered ease and social deference which were the privilege of his class for centuries. He retired finally to the shores of Campania, where, moving from one villa to another, and surrounding himself with books and gems of art, his life flowed away undisturbed by the agony of Rome in the last terror of the Caesars. Among his many estates he was the proud owner of one of Cicero’s villas, and of the ground where Virgil sleeps. He used to keep the great poet’s birthday with a scrupulous piety, and he always approached his tomb as a holy place. This apparently placid and fortunate life was, like so many in those days, ended by a voluntary death.(936) Silius Italicus, in his life and in his end, is a true type of a generation which could bend before the storm of despotism, and save itself often by ignominious arts, which could recover its dignity and self-respect in the pursuit of literary ideals, and, at the last, assert the right to shake off the burden of existence when it became too heavy.

Pliny’s theory of life is clearly stated in the Letters, and it was evidently acted on by a great number of the class to which he belonged.(937) The years of vigorous youth should be given to the service of the state, in pursuing the well-marked and carefully-graduated career of honours, or in the strenuous oratorical strife of the law courts. The leisure of later years might be portioned out between social duty, the pleasures or the cares of a rural estate, and the cultivation of literary taste by reading and imitation of the great masters. The last was the most imperious duty of all, for those with any literary gifts, because charm of style gives the one hope of surviving the wreck of time;(938) for mere cultivated facility, as the most refined and creditable way of filling up the vacant spaces of life. Even if lasting fame was beyond one’s reach, it was something to be able to give pleasure to an audience of cultivated friends at a reading, and to enjoy the triumph of an hour. There must have been many a literary coterie who, if they fed one another’s vanity, also encouraged literary ideals, and hinted gentle criticism,(939) in that polite delicacy of phrase in which the Roman was always an adept. One of these literary circles stands out in Pliny’s pages. At least two of its members had held great office. Arrius Antoninus, the maternal grandfather of the Emperor Antoninus Pius,(940) had twice borne the consulship with antique dignity, and shown himself a model governor as proconsul of Asia.(941) He was devoted to Greek literature, and seems to have preferred to compose in that language. We need not accept literally Pliny’s praises of his Atticism, and of the grace and sweetness of his Greek epigrams. But he seems to have had a facility which Pliny tortured his ingenuity in vain to imitate with the poorer resources of the Latin tongue.(942) Among the friends of Antoninus was Vestricius Spurinna, who had defended Placentia for Otho, who was twice consul under Domitian, and was selected by Trajan to command the troops in a campaign in Germany.(943) This dignified veteran, who had passed apparently untainted through the reigns of the worst emperors, varied and lightened the ordinary routine of his old age by the composition of lyrics, both in Greek and Latin, which seemed to his admirers to have a singular sweetness. Sentius Augurinus, a familiar friend of the two consulars, was also a brilliant verse writer,(944) who could enthral Pliny by a recitation lasting for three days, although the fact that Pliny was the subject of one of the poems may account for the patience or the pleasure. One of Pliny’s dearest friends was Passennus Paullus, who claimed kindred with the poet Propertius, and, at any rate, came from the same town in Umbria. Passennus has been cruelly treated by Time, if his lyric efforts recalled, as we are asked to believe, the literary graces of his ancestor, and even those of Horace.(945) Vergilius Romanus devoted himself to comedy, and was thought to have reproduced not unworthily the delicate charms of Menander and Terence, as well as the scathing invective of older Greek masters of the art.(946) But there were others of Pliny’s circle who essayed a loftier and weightier style. Probably the foremost of these was Titinius Capito, who, as an inscription records,(947) had held high civil office under Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan. He was an enthusiastic patron of letters, and readily offered his halls to literary friends for their recitations, which he attended with punctilious politeness. Cherishing the memory of the great men of the Republic, the Cassii, the Bruti, and the Catos, he composed a work on the death of the noble victims of the Terror.(948) He tried in vain to draw Pliny into the field of historical composition.(949) But the man who thought more of style and graceful charity than of truth, was not the man to write the history of such a time. He has done a much greater service in providing priceless materials for the reconstruction of its social history. Caninius Rufus was a neighbour of Pliny at Como.(950) He was one of those for whom the charms of country life had a dangerous seduction. His villa, with its colonnades, “where it was always spring,” the shining levels of the lake beneath his verandah, the water course with its emerald banks, the baths and spacious halls, all these delights seem to have relaxed the literary energy and ambition of their master. Caninius meditated the composition of a Greek epic on the Dacian wars of Trajan.(951) But he was probably one of those lingering, dilatory writers who meet us in Martial,(952) waiting for the fire from heaven which never comes. The intractable roughness of barbarian names, which, as Pliny suggests, might have been eluded by a Homeric licence in quantity, was probably not the only difficulty of Caninius.

Among the literary friends of Pliny, a much more important person than Caninius was Suetonius, but Suetonius was apparently long paralysed by the same cautious hesitation to challenge the verdict of the public. A younger man than Pliny,(953) Suetonius was one of his most intimate friends. They both belonged to that circle which nursed the senatorial tradition and the hatred of the imperial tyrants.(954) The life of Suetonius was not very effectual or brilliant, from a worldly point of view. Although born within the rank to which every distinction was open,(955) he was a man of modest and retiring tastes, devoted to quiet research, and destitute of the eager ambition and vigorous self-assertion which are necessary for splendid success. He was probably for some years a professor of grammar.(956) He made a half-hearted attempt to gain a footing at the bar. In 101 A.D. he obtained a military tribunate, through Pliny’s influence, but speedily renounced his command.(957) Henceforth he devoted himself entirely to that historical research, which, if it has not won for him any dazzling fame, has made historical students, in spite of some reservations as to his sources, his debtors for all time. Pliny had the greatest esteem for Suetonius, and was always ready to befriend him, whether it were in the purchase of a quiet little retreat near Rome,(958) or in obtaining for the childless antiquary the Jus trium liberorum from Trajan.(959) The two men were bound to one another by many tastes and sympathies, not the least strong being a curious superstition, which infected, as we shall see in a later chapter, even the most vigorous minds of that age. Suetonius had once a dream which seemed to portend failure in some legal cause in which he was engaged. He sought the aid of Pliny to obtain an adjournment. Pliny does not question the reality of such warnings, but merely suggests a more cheering interpretation of the vision.(960) Although devoted to research, and a most laborious student, the biographer of the Caesars was strangely tardy in letting his productions see the light. In 106, he had been long engaged on a work, which was probably the De Viris Illustribus.(961) Pliny assailed him with bantering reproaches on his endless use of the file, and begs him to publish without delay. From several indications, it appears that the lingering volume did not appear till 113.(962) It was not till the year 118, when Hadrian arrived from the East after his accession, that Suetonius attained the rank of one of the imperial secretaryships.(963) Pliny in all probability had died some years before the elevation of his friend.

But although the dawn of a new age of milder and less suspicious government had, for the first time since Augustus, left men free to compose a true record of the past, and even to vilify the early Caesars,(964) the great mass of cultivated men in Pliny’s time, as in the days of Ausonius and Sidonius, were devoted to poetry. The chief cause in giving this direction to the Roman mind was undoubtedly the system pursued in the schools. In the first century, as in the fifth, the formative years of boyhood were devoted almost entirely to the study of the poets. The subject-matter of their masterpieces was not neglected by the accomplished grammarian, who was often a man of learning, and sometimes a man of taste; and the reading of poetry was made the text for disquisitions on geography and astronomy, on mythology or the antiquities of religious ritual and constitutional lore.(965) But style and expression were always of foremost interest in these studies. The ear of the South has always felt the charm of rhythmical or melodious speech, with a keenness of pleasure generally denied to our colder temperament. And the Augustan age had, in a single generation, performed miracles, under Greek inspiration, in moulding the Latin tongue to be the apt vehicle of every mood of poetic feeling. That inspired band of writers, whose call it was to glorify the dawn of a world-wide empire and the ancient achievements of the Latin race,(966) rose to the full height of their vocation. They were conscious that they were writing for distant provinces won from barbarism, and for a remote posterity.(967) They discovered and revealed resources in the language, hitherto undreamt of. They wedded to its native dignity and strength a brilliancy, an easy grace and sprightliness, which positively ravished the ear of the street boys in Pompeii, or of the rude dweller on the Tanais or the Baetis.(968) In his own lifetime Virgil became a popular hero. His Eclogues were chanted on the stage; verses of the Aeneid can still be seen, along with verses of Propertius, scrawled on the walls of Campanian towns. Virgil, when he visited Rome, was mobbed by admiring crowds. When his poetry was recited in the theatre, the whole audience rose to their feet as if to salute the emperor.(969) He had the doubtful but significant honour of being recited by Alexandrian boys at the coarse orgies of a Trimalchio.(970) Never was a worthy fame so rapidly and splendidly won: seldom has literary fame and influence been so lasting.

The Flavian age succeeded to this great heritage. Already there were ominous signs of a decay of originality and force, of decadence in the language itself.(971) The controversy between the lovers of the new and the lovers of the archaic style was raging in the reign of Vespasian, and can be still followed in the De Oratoribus of Tacitus, or even in the verses of Martial.(972) Already the taste for Ennius and the prae-Ciceronian oratory had set in, for the dialect of the heroes of the Punic Wars, even for “the Latin of the Twelve Tables,”(973) a taste which was destined to produce its Dead Sea fruit in the age of the Antonines. But whoever might cavil at Cicero,(974) no one ever questioned the pre-eminence of Virgil, and he and his contemporaries were still the models of a host of imitators. The mass of facile talent, thrown back on itself by the loss of free republican life and public interests, fascinated from earliest infancy by the haunting cadences of the grand style, rushed into verse-writing, to beguile long hours of idleness, or to woo a shadowy fame at an afternoon recital, with a more shadowy hope of future fame. The grand style was a charmer and deceiver. It was such a perfect instrument, it was so protean in its various power, it was so abundant in its resources, that a man of third-rate powers and thin commonplace imagination, who had been trained in skilful manipulation of consecrated phrase, might for the moment delude himself and his friends by faint echoes of the music of the golden age.

The brilliancy of inherited phrase concealed the poverty of the literary amateur’s fancy from himself. And, even if he were not deluded about his own powers, the practice in skilful handling of literary symbols, which was acquired in the schools, furnished a refined amusement for a too ample leisure. It is clear from the dialogue De Oratoribus, and from Pliny’s Letters, that the meditative life, surrounded by the quiet charm of stream and woodland, far from the din and strife and social routine of the great city,(975) attracted many people much more than the greatest oratorical triumphs in the centumviral court, which, after all, were so pale and bourgeois beside the glories of the great ages of oratory. And although Aper, in the Dialogue of Tacitus, sneers at the solitary and unsocial toil of the poet, rewarded by a short-lived succès d’estime,(976) there can be no doubt that the ambition to cut a figure, even for a day, was a powerful inspiration at a time when the ancient avenues to fame had been closed.

It was to satisfy such ambitions that Domitian founded the quinquennial competition on the Capitol, in the year 86 A.D.,(977) as well as the annual festival in honour of Minerva on the Alban Mount. A similar festival, for the cultivation of Greek poetry, had been established at Naples in honour of Augustus, at which Statius had won the crown of corn-ears.(978) And Nero had founded another, apparently only for his own glorification.(979) The festival established by Domitian was more important and enduring. The judges were taken from the priestly colleges, and, amid a concourse of the highest functionaries of the state, the successful poet received his crown at the hands of the emperor. The prospect of such a distinction drew competitors from distant provincial parts. It is a curious illustration of the power and the skill of the literary discipline of the schools that, twice within a few years, the crown of oak leaves was won by boys under fourteen years of age. The verses of one of them may still be read upon his tomb.(980)

But these infrequent chances of distinction could not suffice for the crowd of eager composers. In those days, although the bookselling trade was extensive and vigorous, there was no organised publishing system by which a new work could be brought to the notice of the public.(981) The author had to advertise himself by giving readings, to which he invited his friends, and by distributing copies of his book. The mania for recitation was the theme of satirists from the days of Horace to the days of Epictetus.(982) Martial comically describes the frenzied poet torturing his friends day and night, pursuing them from the bath to the dining-room, and spreading a solitude around him.(983) Juvenal congratulates his friend on escaping to the country from the hoarse reciter of a frigid Theseid.(984) In the bohemian scenes of Petronius, the inveterate versifier, who will calmly finish a passage, after being cast ashore from a shipwreck, makes himself a nuisance by his recitations in the baths and porticoes of Croton, and is very properly stoned by a crowd of street boys.(985) No aspect of social life is more prominent in the Letters of Pliny than the reading of new works, epics, or lyrics, histories, or speeches, before fashionable assemblies. A liberal patron like Titinius Capito would sometimes lend a hall for the purpose. But the reciter had many expenses, from the hire of chairs to the fees to freedmen and slaves, who acted as claqueurs. In the circle of a man like Pliny, to attend these gatherings was a sacred duty both to letters and to friendship. In a year when there was a more than usually abundant crop of poets, the eager advocate could boast that he had failed no one, even in the month when the courts were busiest.(986) Doubtless, many of the fashionable idlers, who dawdled away their time in the many resorts devoted to gossip and scandal, were glad to show themselves in the crowd. Old friends would consider it a duty to support and encourage the budding literary ambition of a young aspirant of their set. Some sincere lovers of literary art would be drawn by a genuine interest and a wish to maintain the literary tradition, which was already betraying signs of weakness and decay. But, to a great many, this duty, added to the endless round of other social obligations, was evidently becoming repulsive and wearisome.(987) Pliny could listen with delight and admiration to Sentius Augurinus reciting his poems for three long days.(988) He would calmly expect his own friends to listen for as many days to a whole volume of his poems, or to his Panegyric on Trajan.(989) Such was his high breeding, his kindliness, and such was his passion for literature in any form or of any quality, that he could hardly understand how what to him seemed at once a pleasure and duty should be regarded by others as an intolerable nuisance. The conduct of such people is treated with some disdain in one or two of the rare passages in which he writes of his circle with any severity. Some of these fashionable folk, after lingering in some place of gossip until the reading was well advanced, would enter the hall with ostentatious reluctance, and then leave before the end. Others, with an air of superiority, would sit in stolid silence and disguise the slightest expression of interest. This seemed to Pliny, not only grossly bad manners, but also neglect of a literary duty.(990) The audience should not only encourage honest effort; they should contribute their judgment to the improvement of style. Pliny, like Aristotle, has an immense faith in the collective opinion of numbers, even in matters of artistic taste.(991) He used to read his own pieces to successively wider circles, each time receiving suggestions for amendment. Many of Pliny’s Letters, like the dialogue De Oratoribus, reveal the keenness with which in those days questions of style were debated. But, as in the circle of Sidonius, this very energy of criticism was perhaps due to a dim consciousness of waning force.(992) Pliny, with all his kindly optimism, lets fall a phrase here and there which betrays an uneasiness about the future of letters.(993) Enthusiasm is failing. Nay, there is a hardly veiled contempt for that eager mediocrity which Pliny and Titinius Capito made it a point of honour to encourage. We feel that we are on the edge of that arid desert of cultivated impotence in which the freshness and vigour of Roman literature was soon mysteriously to disappear.

Great as were the attractions of the capital, its gay social circles with their multifarious engagements, its games and spectacles, and literary novelties, yet the most devoted “Ardelio,” in the end, felt the strain and the monotony to be oppressive.(994) Seneca and Pliny, Martial and Juvenal,(995) from various points of view, lament or ridicule the inanity and the slavery of city life. Roman etiquette was perhaps the most imperious and exacting that ever existed. Morning receptions, punctilious attendance at the assumption of the toga, at betrothals, or the sealing of wills, or the reading of some tedious epic, advice or support in the law courts, congratulations to friends on every official success, these duties, and many others, left men, who had a large circle of acquaintance, hardly a moment of repose. Hence the rapture with which Pliny escapes to the stillness of the Laurentine pine woods, or the pure cold breezes that blew from the Apennines over his Tuscan seat.(996) In these calm solitudes the weary advocate and man of letters became for a little while his own master, and forgot the din and crush of the streets, the paltry ambitions, the malevolent gossip and silly rumours of the great world, in some long-suspended literary task. There can be no doubt that an intense enjoyment was becoming more and more felt in country life. Its unbought, home-grown luxuries, its common sights and sounds, its antique simplicity, have a strange charm even for a hardened bohemian like Martial.(997) But Pliny, besides this commoner form of enjoyment, has a keen and exquisite feeling for beauty of scenery. He loves the amphitheatre of hills, crowned with immemorial forest that looks down on rich pastoral slope, or vineyard or meadow, bright with the flowers of spring, and watered by the winding Tiber; he loves the scenery of Como, where you watch the fishermen at his toils from some retreat on the terraced banks.(998) Where in ancient literature can you find a more sharp and clear-cut picture of a romantic scene than in his description of the Clitumnus?(999) The famous stream rises under a low hill, shaded by ancient cypresses, and broadens into a basin in whose glassy ice-cold waters you may count the pebbles. Soon the current grows broader and swifter, and the barges are swept along under groves of ash and poplar, which, so vivid is their reflection, seem to be growing in the river-bed. Hard by, is a temple of the river-god, with many other chapels, and a seat of ancient augury; the magic charm of antique religious awe blends with the witchery of nature, and many a villa is planted on fair spots along the banks. There was plenty of sport to be had in the Apennines or the Laurentine woods. But Pliny was plainly not a real sportsman. He once tells his friend Tacitus, who seems to have rallied him on this failing, that although he has killed three boars, he much prefers to sit, tablets in hand beside the nets, meditating in the silent glade.(1000) The country is charming to Pliny, but its greatest charm lies in the long tranquil hours which can be given to literary musing. Part of the well-regulated day of Spurinna, a man who had commanded armies and governed provinces, and who had reached his seventy-seventh year, is devoted to lyric composition both in Greek and Latin.(1001) Pliny once or twice laments the mass of literary talent which, from diffidence or love of ease, was buried in these rural retreats.(1002) There must have been many a country squire, like that Terentius, who, apparently lost in bucolic pursuits, surprised his guest by the purity of his taste and his breadth of culture. We often meet the same buried talent after nearly four centuries in the pages of Sidonius.(1003)

The literature of the Flavian age has preserved for us many pictures of Roman villas. They occupied every variety of site. They were planted on rocks where the sea-foam flecked their walls,(1004) or on inland lakes and rivers, embowered in woods, or on the spurs of the Apennines, between the ancient forest and the wealthy plain.(1005) Some of these mansions were remote and secluded. But on the Bay of Naples, on the Laurentine shore or the banks of Lake Como,(1006) they clustered thickly. Building in the days of Domitian was as much the rage as it was in the days of Horace, and, just as then, all natural obstacles were defied in preparing a site to the builder’s taste. In the grounds of Pollius Felix in the Silvae, whole hills had been levelled, and rocks had been cleared away to make a space for the house with its gardens and woodlands.(1007) Manlius Vopiscus had built two luxurious seats on opposite banks of the Anio, where the stream glides silently under overarching boughs.(1008) The villas pressed so close to the water that you could converse, and almost touch hands, across the interval between them. The love of variety, or the obligation imposed on senators to invest a third of their fortune in Italian land,(1009) may account for the number of country seats possessed even by men who were not of the wealthiest class.(1010) Pliny had villas at Laurentum, at Tifernum Tiberinum, at Beneventum, and more than two on Lake Como.(1011) The orator Regulus had at least five country seats.(1012) Silius Italicus had several stately abodes in the same district of Campania, and, with capricious facility, transferred his affections to each new acquisition.(1013)

It is by no means an easy task, and perhaps not a very profitable one, to trace minutely the arrangement of one of these great houses. Indeed there seems to have been a good deal of caprice and little care for symmetry in their architecture. The builder appears to have given no thought to external effect. To catch a romantic view from the windows, to escape the sultry heat of midsummer, or woo the brief sunshine of December, above all to obtain perfect stillness, were the objects which seem to have dictated the plans of the Roman architect.(1014) The Laurentine villa of Pliny and the Surrentine of Pollius Felix from their windows or colonnades gave glimpses of forest or mountain, or sea, or fat herds browsing on the meadow grass, or a view seaward to the islands off the Campanian shore.(1015) One room admits the morning sun, another is brightened by the glow of evening. Here is a colonnade where in winter you can pace up and down with shutters closed on the weather side, or in spring-time enjoy the scent of violets and the temperate sunshine.(1016) In the mansions on the Anio, there is, according to Statius, an air of everlasting quietness, never broken even by wandering wind, or ripple of the stream.(1017) Pliny has a distant room at Laurentum, to which even the licensed din of the Saturnalia never penetrates.(1018) Thus these villas threw out their chambers far and wide, meandering in all directions, according to the fancy of the master, or the charms of the neighbouring scenery.

The luxury of the Roman villa consisted rather in the spaciousness and variety of building, to suit the changing seasons, than in furniture for comfort or splendour. There were, indeed, in many houses some costly articles, tables of citrus and ivory, and antique vases, of priceless worth.(1019) But the chambers of the most stately houses would probably, to modern taste, seem scantily furnished. It was on the walls and ceiling and columns that the Roman of taste lavished his wealth. The houses of Pliny, indeed, seem to have been little adorned by this sort of costly display.(1020) But the villa of Pollius Felix, like the baths of Claudius Etruscus, shone with all the glory of variegated marbles on plaque and pillar, drawn from the quarries of Phrygia, Laconia, and Syene, Carystus and Numidia.(1021) Pliny confesses that he is not a connoisseur in art. He speaks with hesitation of the merit of a Corinthian bronze which he has acquired.(1022) But he was surrounded in his own class by artistic enthusiasm, much of it, it is to be feared, pretentious and ignorant. The dispersion of the artistic wealth of Greek lands had flooded Italy with the works of the great masters. Collectors of them, like Silius Italicus, abounded. The fashion became so general and so imperious, that it penetrated even into the vulgar circle of people like Trimalchio, who, in interpreting the subject of the chasing on a cup, could confuse the Punic and the Trojan wars. In the villas described by Statius, it would seem that the art of Apelles, Pheidias, Myron, and Polycletus adorned the saloons and colonnades.(1023) It may be doubted, however, whether many of these works could claim such illustrious parentage. There was plenty of facile technique in those days which might easily deceive the vulgar collector by more or less successful reproduction.(1024) The confident claim to artistic discrimination was not less common in the Flavian age than in later days, and it was probably as fallible. It is rather suspicious that, in the attempts at artistic appreciation in this period, attention seems to be concentrated on the supposed antiquity, rarity, or costliness of material. There is little in the glowing descriptions in the Silvae to indicate a genuine appreciation of real art.

It is possible that the great Roman country seat, in its vast extent, although not in the stateliness of its exterior, may have surpassed the corresponding mansions of our time. It was the expression in stone of the dominant passion of an enormously wealthy class, intoxicated with the splendour of imperial power, and ambitious to create monuments worthy of an imperial race. Moreover, the Roman’s energy always exulted in triumphing over natural difficulties. Just as he drove his roads unswerving over mountain and swamp, so he took a pride in rearing his piles of masonry on the most obstinate and defiant sites, or even in the middle of the waves. But, in the extent of their parks, and the variety of floral display, the Romans of the most luxurious age seldom reached the modern English standard. The grounds of the villas which, in thick succession, lined the Laurentine or Campanian shore, cannot have been very extensive. Pliny has splendid views from his windows of forest, mountain, and meadow, but the scene lies plainly beyond the bounds of his demesne.(1025) The gardens and shrubberies are very artificial, arranged in terraces or labyrinths close to the house, or with hedges of box clipped into shapes of animals along an open colonnade. The hippodrome at his Tuscan seat, for riding exercise, is formed by lines of box and laurel and cypress and plane tree. The fig and mulberry form a garden at the Laurentine villa.(1026) The cultivated flowers are few, only roses and violets. But the Romans made up for variety by lavish profusion. In the Neronian orgies a fortune was sometimes spent on Egyptian roses for a single banquet.(1027)

We might almost conjecture how the days passed amid such scenes, even without any formal diary. But Pliny has left us two descriptions of a gentleman’s day in the country.(1028) Pliny himself, as we might expect, awoke early, about six o’clock, and in one of those sleeping-rooms, so carefully shut off from the voices of nature or from household noise, with shutters still closed, he meditated some literary piece. Then, calling for his amanuensis, he dictated what he had composed. About ten or eleven, he passed into a shady cloister, opening on a bed of violets, or a grove of plane trees, where he continued his literary work. Then followed a drive, during which, according to his uncle’s precept and example, his studies were still continued.(1029) A short siesta, a walk, declamation in Greek and Latin, after the habit of Cicero, gymnastic exercise, and the bath, filled the space till dinner time arrived. During this meal, a book was read aloud, and the evening hours were enlivened by acting or music and the society of friends. Occasional hunting and the cares of a rural estate came in to vary this routine. The round of Spurinna’s day, which excited Pliny’s admiration by its rigid regularity, is pretty much the same as his own, except that Spurinna seems to have talked more and read less.(1030)

To the ordinary English squire Pliny’s studious life in the country would not seem very attractive. And his pretence of sport was probably ridiculed even in his own day.(1031) But his Letters give glimpses of a rural society which, both in its pleasures and its cares, has probably been always much the same from one age to another in Europe. On his way to Como, Pliny once turned aside for a couple of days to his Tuscan estate, to join in the dedication of a temple which he had built for the people of Tifernum Tiberinum. The consecration was to be followed by a dinner to his good neighbours, who had elected him patron of their township, who were very proud of his career, and greeted him warmly whenever he came among them.(1032) There is also the record of the restoration, in obedience to the warning of a diviner, of an ancient temple of Ceres on his lands, with colonnades to shelter the worshippers who frequented the shrine. And the venerable wooden statue of the goddess, which was much decayed, had to be replaced by a more artistic image. But the life of a Roman proprietor, of course, had its prosaic and troublesome side which Pliny does not conceal. There is an interesting letter in which he consults a friend on the question of the purchase of an estate.(1033) It adjoined, or rather cut into his own lands. It could be managed by the same bailiff, and the same staff of labourers and artisans would serve for both estates. On the other hand, Pliny thinks, it is better not to put too many eggs into one basket. It is more prudent to have estates widely dispersed, and thus less exposed to a single stroke of calamity. Moreover this estate, however tempting, with its fertile, well-watered meadows, its vineyards and woods, is burdened by an insolvent tenantry, who, through faulty management, have been allowed to fall into arrear. Pliny, however, is tempted to buy at a greatly reduced price,(1034) and, in order to meet the payment, although his wealth is nearly all in land, he can call in some loans at interest, and the balance can be borrowed from his father-in-law, whose purse is always at his disposal. Pliny was sometimes worried by the complaints of the people on his estates, and finds it very difficult to secure solvent tenants on a five years lease. He made liberal remissions of rent, but arrears went on accumulating, until the tenant in despair gave up any attempt to repay his debt. In this extremity, Pliny resolved to adopt a different system of letting. He substituted for a fixed rent a certain proportion of the produce,(1035) in fact the métayer system, and employed some of his people to see that the returns were not fraudulently diminished. At another time he is embarrassed by finding that, owing to a bad vintage, the men who have bought his grapes in advance are going to be heavy losers. He makes a uniform remission to all of about twelve per cent. But he gives an additional advantage to the large buyers, and to those who had been prompt in their payments.(1036) It is characteristic of the man that he says, quite naturally, that the landlord should share with his tenant such risks from the fickleness of nature.

So good a man was sure to be far more afflicted by the troubles of his dependents than by any pecuniary losses of his own. One year, there were many deaths among his slaves. Pliny feels this acutely, but he consoles himself by the reflection that he has been liberal in manumission, and still more liberal in allowing his slaves to make their wills, the validity of which he maintains as if they were legal instruments.(1037) If Pliny shows a little too much self-complacency in this human sympathy, there can be no doubt that, like Seneca, he felt that slaves were humble friends, men of the same flesh and blood as the master, and that the master has a moral duty towards them, quite apart from the legal conventions of Rome.(1038) When his wife’s grandfather proposed to make numerous manumissions, Pliny rejoiced greatly at the accession of so many new citizens to the municipality.(1039) When his favourite reader, Encolpius, was seized with hemorrhage, Pliny displayed a genuine and most affectionate concern for the humble partner of his studies.(1040) Another member of his household, a freedman named Zosimus, suffered from the same malady. Zosimus seems to have been a most excellent, loyal, and accomplished man. He was very versatile, a comedian, a musician, a tasteful reader of every kind of literature.(1041) His patron sent him to Egypt to recruit his health. But, from putting too great a strain upon his voice, he had a return of his dangerous illness, and once more needed change of air. Pliny determined to send him to the Riviera, and begs a friend, Paulinus, to let Zosimus have the use of his villa and all necessary attention, for which Pliny will bear the cost.(1042) In his social relations with his freedmen Pliny always shows himself the perfect, kindly gentleman. Juvenal and Martial poured their scorn on those unequal dinners, where the guests were graduated, and where poorer wine and coarser viands were served out to those of humble degree.(1043) Pliny was present at one of these entertainments, and he expresses his contempt for the vulgar host in terms of unwonted energy.(1044) His own freedmen, as he tells a fellow-guest, are entertained as equals at his table. If a man fears the expense, he can find a remedy by restraining his own luxury, and sharing the plain fare which he imposes on his company. Pliny’s relations with his slaves and freedmen were very like those which the kindly English squire cultivates towards his household and dependents. The affectionate regret for a good master or mistress, recorded on many an inscription of that age,(1045) shows that Pliny’s household was by no means a rare exception.

Yet the Letters of Pliny, with all their charity and tranquil optimism, reveal now and then a darker side of household slavery. A man of praetorian rank named Largius Macedo, who forgot, or perhaps too vividly remembered, his own servile origin, was known as a cruel and haughty master. While he was enjoying the bath in his Formian villa, he was suddenly surrounded by a throng of angry slaves who, with every expression of hatred and loathing, inflicted on him such injuries that he was left for dead on the glowing pavement. He seemed, or pretended for a while, to be dead. A few who remained faithful took up the apparently lifeless corpse, amid the shrieks of his concubines, and bore him into the Frigidarium. The coolness and the clamour recalled him from his swoon. The would-be murderers meanwhile had fled, but many of them were caught in the end, and the outrage was sternly avenged.(1046) In another letter, Pliny tells the tale of the mysterious disappearance of one Metilius Crispus, a citizen of Como, for whom Pliny had obtained equestrian rank, and made him a gift of the required HS.400,000. Metilius set out on a journey and was never heard of again.(1047) It is significant that of the slaves who attended him no one ever reappeared. Amid such perils, says Pliny, do we masters live, and no kindness can relieve us from alarm. Seneca remarks that the master’s life is continually at the mercy of his slaves.(1048) And the cruel stringency of legislation shows how real was the peril.

Pliny was only an infant in the evil days when suicide was the one refuge from tyranny, when the lancet so often opened the way to “eternal freedom.” Yet, even in his later years, men not unfrequently escaped from intolerable calamity or incurable disease by a voluntary death.(1049) The morality of suicide was long a debated question. There were strict moralists who maintained that it was never lawful to quit one’s post before the final signal to retreat. Men like Seneca regarded it as a question to be determined by circumstances and motives.(1050) He would not palliate wild, impetuous self-murder, without a justifying cause. On the other hand, there might be, especially under a monster like Nero, cases in which it were mere folly not to choose an easy emancipation rather than a certain death of torture and ignominy. Eternal law, which has assigned a single entrance to this life, has mercifully allowed us many exits. Any death is preferable to servitude.(1051) So, in the case of disease and old age, it is merely a question whether the remainder of life is worth living. If the mental powers are falling into irreparable decay, if the malady is tormenting and incurable, Seneca would permit the rational soul to quit abruptly its crumbling tenement, not to escape pain or weakness, but to shake off the slavery of a worthless life.(1052)

Pliny was not a philosopher, and had no elaborate theory of suicide or of anything else. But his opinion on the question may be gathered from his remarks on the case of Titius Aristo, the learned jurist. To rush on death, he says, is a vulgar, commonplace act. But to balance the various motives, and make a deliberate and rational choice may, in certain circumstances, be the proof of a lofty mind.(1053) The cases of suicide described in the Letters are nearly always cases of incurable or prolonged disease. The best known is that of the luxurious Silius Italicus, who starved himself to death in his seventy-fifth year.(1054) He was afflicted with an incurable tumour, almost the only trouble in his long and happy life. Corellius Rufus, who had watched over Pliny’s career with almost parental care,(1055) chose to end his life in a similar manner. Pliny was immensely saddened by the close of a life which seemed to enjoy so many blessings, high character, great reputation and influence, family love and friendship. Yet he does not question the last resolve of Corellius. In his thirty-third year he had been seized with hereditary gout. During the period of vigorous manhood, he had warded off its onsets by an extreme abstinence. But as old age crept on, its tortures, wracking every limb, became unendurable, and Corellius determined to put an end to the hopeless struggle. His obstinacy was proof against all the entreaties of his wife and friends, and Pliny, who was called in as a last resource, came only to hear the physician repelled for the last time with a single energetic word.(1056) Sailing once on Lake Como, Pliny heard from an old friend the tragic tale of a double suicide from a verandah overhanging the lake. The husband had long suffered from a loathsome and hopeless malady. His wife insisted on knowing the truth, and, when it was revealed to her, she nerved him to end the cruel ordeal, and promised to bear him company. Bound together, the pair took the fatal leap.(1057)

In spite of his charity and optimism,(1058) it would not be altogether true to say that Pliny was blind to the faults and vices of his time. He speaks, with almost Tacitean scorn, of the rewards which awaited a calculating childlessness, and of the eager servility of the will-hunter.(1059) In recommending a tutor for the son of Corellia Hispulla, he regards the teacher’s stainless character as of paramount importance in an age of dangerous licence, when youth was beset with manifold seductions.(1060) He blushes for the degradation of senatorial character displayed in the scurrilous or obscene entries which were sometimes found on the voting tablets of the august body.(1061) The decline of modesty and courteous deference in the young towards their elders greatly afflicted so courteous a gentleman. There seemed to be no respect left for age or authority. With their fancied omniscience and intuitive wisdom, young men disdain to learn from any one or to imitate any example; they are their own models.(1062) Among the many spotless and charming women of Pliny’s circle, there is one curious exception, one, we may venture to surmise, who had been formed in the Neronian age. Ummidia Quadratilla was a lady of the highest rank, who died at the age of eighty in the middle of the reign of Trajan.(1063) She preserved to the end an extraordinary health and vigour, and evidently enjoyed the external side of life with all the zest of the old days of licence in her youth. Her grandson, who lived under her roof, was one of Pliny’s dearest friends, a spotless and almost puritanical character. Ummidia, even in her old age, kept a troop of pantomimic artistes, and continued to enjoy their doubtful exhibitions. But her grandson would never witness them, and, it must be said, Ummidia respected and even encouraged a virtue superior to her own.

It has been remarked that, in nearly all these cases, where Pliny has any fault to find with his generation, the evil seems to be only a foil for the virtue of some of his friends. Even in his own day, there were those who criticised him for his extravagant praise of the people he loved. He takes the censure as a compliment, preferring the kind-heartedness which is occasionally deceived, to the cold critical habit which has lost all illusions.(1064) Pliny belonged to a caste who were linked to one another by the strongest ties of loyalty and tradition.(1065) The members of it were bound to support one another by counsel, encouragement, and influence, they were expected to help a comrade’s advancement in the career of honours, to applaud and stimulate his literary ambition, to be prodigal of sympathy or congratulation or pecuniary help in all the vicissitudes of public or private life.(1066) The older men, who had borne the weight of great affairs, recognised the duty of forming the character of their juniors by precept and criticism. In this fashion the old soldier Spurinna, on his morning drive, would pour forth to some young companion the wealth of his long experience. In this spirit Verginius Rufus and Corellius stood by Pliny throughout his official career, to guide and support him.(1067) Pliny, in his turn, was always lavish of this kind of help, and deemed it a matter of pride and duty to afford it. Sometimes he solicits office for a friend’s son, or commends a man to the emperor for the Jus trium liberorum.(1068) Sometimes he applauds the early efforts of a young pleader at the bar, or gives him counsel as to the causes which he should undertake, or the discipline necessary for oratorical success.(1069) He was often consulted about the choice of a tutor for boys, and he responded with all the earnestness of a man who believed in the infinite importance of sound influence in the early years of life.(1070) To his older friends he would address disquisitions on style, consolations in bereavement, congratulations on official preferment, descriptions of some fair scene or picturesque incident in rural life. He often wrote, like Symmachus, merely to maintain the connection of friendly sympathy by a chat on paper. His vanity is only too evident in some of these letters. But it is, after all, an innocent vanity and the consuming anxiety to cherish the warmth and solidarity of friendship, and a high tone in the great class to which he belonged, might well cover even graver faults. If there was too much self-indulgence in that class, if they often abandoned themselves to the seductions of ease and literary trifling in luxurious retreats, it is also to be remembered that a man of rank paid heavily for his place in Roman society, both in money and in the observance of a very exacting social code. And no one recognised the obligation with more cheerful alacrity than Pliny.

Pliny felt a genuine anxiety that young men of birth should aim at personal distinction. Any gleam of generous ambition, any sign of strenuous energy, which might save a young aristocrat from the temptations of ease and wealth, were hailed by him with unaffected delight. He was evidently very susceptible to the charm of manner which youths of this class often possess. When to that was added strength of character, his satisfaction was complete. Hence his delight when Fuscus Salinator and Ummidius Quadratus, of the very cream of the Roman nobility, entered on the conflicts of the Centumviral Court.(1071) And indeed these young men appear to have had many graces and virtues. Salinator, in particular, with exquisite literary culture, had a mingled charm of boyish simplicity, gravity, and sweetness.(1072) Asinius Bassus, the son of Asinius Rufus, was another of this promising band of youth, blameless, learned, and diligent, whom Pliny commends for the quaestorship to Fundanus, then apparently designated as consul.(1073) There is no more genuine feeling in the Letters than the grief of Pliny for the early death of Junius Avitus, another youth of high promise. Pliny had formed his character, and supported him in his candidature for office. He had helped him with advice in his studies, or in his administrative duties. Avitus repaid all this paternal care by a docility and deference which were becoming rare among the young men of the day. Winning the affection and confidence of his elders in the service, Avitus was surely destined to develop into one of those just and strenuous imperial officers, like Corbulo or Verginius Rufus, many of whom have left only a name on a brief inscription, but who were the glory and strength of the Empire in the times of its deepest degradation. But all such hopes for Avitus were extinguished in a day.

The upright and virtuous men of Pliny’s circle, Corellius Rufus, Titinius Capito the historian, Pegasus the learned jurist, Trebonius Rufus the magistrate who suppressed the games at Vienne, Junius Mauricus, who would have denied them to the capital, and many others of the like stamp, have often been used to refute the pessimism of Juvenal. We have in a former chapter seen reason to believe that the satirist’s view of female character needs to be similarly rectified. Even in the worst reigns the pages of Tacitus reveal to us strong and pure women, both in the palace and in great senatorial houses. In the wide philosophic class there was probably many an Arria and Plotina. In the Agricola, and in Seneca’s letters to Marcia and Helvia, we can see that, even at the darkest hour, there were homes with an atmosphere of old Roman self-restraint and sobriety, where good women wielded a powerful influence over their husbands and their sons, and where the examples of the old Republic were used, as Biblical characters with us, to fortify virtue.(1074) Seneca, in his views about women, as in many other things, is essentially modern. He admires indeed the antique ideal of self-contained strength and homely virtue. But he also believes in the equal capacity of women for culture, even in the field of philosophy, and he half regrets that an old-fashioned prejudice had debarred Helvia from receiving a philosophic discipline.(1075) Tacitus and Pliny, who had no great faith in philosophy as a study for men, would hardly have recommended it for women. But they lived among women who were cultivated in the best sense. Pliny’s third wife, Calpurnia, was able to give him the fullest sympathy in his literary efforts.(1076) But her fame, of which she probably little dreamt, is founded on her purity and sweetness of character. Her ancestors, like Pliny’s, belonged to the aristocracy of Como. Her aunt, Calpurnia Hispulla, who was a dear friend of Pliny’s mother, had watched over her during the years of girlhood with a sedulous care which made her an ideal wife. What Calpurnia was like as a girl, we may probably picture to ourselves from the prose elegy of Pliny on the death of the young daughter of Minutius Fundanus.(1077) It is the picture of a beautiful character, and a fair young life cut off too soon. The girl had not yet reached her fourteenth year. She was already betrothed when she was seized with a fatal sickness. Her sweet girlish modesty, which was combined with a matronly gravity, charmed all her father’s friends. She had love for all the household, her tutors and slaves, nurses and maids. A vigorous mind triumphed over bodily weakness, and she passed through her last illness with a sweet patience, encouraging her father and sister to bear up, and showing no shrinking from death.

Although we know of a good many happy wedded lives in that age,(1078) there is no picture so full of pure devotion and tenderness as that which we have in Pliny’s letters to Calpurnia. They are love-letters in the best sense and the most perfect style.(1079) Pliny’s youth was long past when he won the hand of Calpurnia, yet their love for one another is that of boy and girl. When she has to go into Campania for her health, he is racked with all sorts of anxiety about her, and entreats her to write once, or even twice, a day. Pliny reads her letters over and over again, as if they had just come. He has her image before him by night, and at the wonted hour by day his feet carry him to her vacant room. His only respite from these pains of a lover is while he is engaged in court. Pliny had frequent care about Calpurnia’s health. They did not belong to the hideous class who preferred “the rewards of childlessness,” but their hopes of offspring were dashed again and again. These griefs were imparted to Calpurnia’s aunt, and to her grandfather, Calpurnius Fabatus, a generous old squire of Como, who was as anxious as Pliny to have descendants of his race. At the time of the old man’s death, Calpurnia was with her husband in Bithynia, and she wished to hasten home at once to console her aunt. Pliny, not having time to secure the emperor’s sanction, gave her the official order for the use of the public post on her journey back to Italy. In answer to his letter of explanation and excuse, Trajan sent his approval in his usual kind and courteous style. This is the last glimpse we have of Pliny and Calpurnia.(1080)

Pliny’s character, as displayed in his Letters, is the embodiment of the finest moral tone of the great age which had opened when he died, in kindlier or juster treatment of the slave, in high respect for women, in conscientious care for the education of the young, in beneficent provision for the helpless and distressed. But it would be a mistaken view to regard these ideas as an altogether new departure. It is dangerous to assert that anything is altogether new in Roman social history. The truth is that the moral sentiment in which these movements took their rise had been for generations in the air. It was diffused by the Stoic preaching of the brotherhood and equality of men as fellow-citizens of one great commonwealth. The duty of redeeming the captive and succouring the poor had been preached by Cicero a century and a half before Pliny’s Letters appeared.(1081) Horace had, a few years later, asked the searching question, “Why should the worthy be in want while you have wealth?”(1082) Seneca preaches, with the unction of an evangelist, all the doctrines on which the humane legislation of the Antonine age was founded, all the principles of humanity and charity of every age. He asserts the natural equality of bond and free, and the claim of the slave to kindness and consideration.(1083) He brands in many a passage the cruelty and contempt of the slaveholder. He preaches tolerance of the froward, forgiveness of insult and injury.(1084) He enforces the duty of universal kindness and helpfulness by the example of God, who is bounteous and merciful even to the evildoer.(1085) Juvenal was little of a philosopher, but he had unconsciously drunk deep of the gospel of philosophy. Behind all his bitter pessimism there is a pure and lofty moral tone which sometimes almost approaches the ideal of charity in S. Paul. The slave whom we torture or insult for some slight negligence is of the same elements as we are.(1086) The purity of childhood is not to be defiled by the ribaldry of the banquet and the example of a mother’s intrigues or a father’s brutal excesses.(1087) Revenge is the pleasure of a puny soul.(1088) The guilty may be left to the scourge of the unseen inquisitor. Juvenal regards the power of sympathy for any human grief or pain as the priceless gift of Nature, “who has given us tears.”(1089) It is by her command that we mourn the calamity of a friend or the death of the babe “too small for the funeral pyre.” The scenes of suffering and pity which the satirist has sketched in some tender lines were assuredly not imaginary pictures. We are apt to forget, in our modern self-complacency, that, at least among civilised races, human nature in its broad features remains pretty much the same from age to age. On an obscure epitaph of this period you may read the words—Bene fac, hoc tecum feres.(1090) Any one who knows the inscriptions may be inclined to doubt whether private benefactions under the Antonines were less frequent and generous than in our own day.

The duties of wealth, both in Greece and Rome, were at all times rigorously enforced by public opinion. The rich had to pay heavily for their honours and social consideration in the days of Cicero, and in the days of Symmachus, as they had in the days of Pericles.(1091) They had to contribute to the amusement of the people, and to support a crowd of clients and freedmen. In the remotest municipality, the same ambitions and the same social demands, as we shall show in the next chapter, put an enormous strain on the resources of the upper class. Men must have often ruined themselves by this profuse liberality. In the reign of Augustus a great patron had several times given a favourite freedman sums of £3000 or £4000. The patron’s descendant in the reign of Nero had to become a pensioner of the emperor. Juvenal and Martial reveal the clamorous demands by which the great patron was assailed.(1092) The motives for this generosity of the wealthy class were at all times mixed and various. But in our period, the growth of a pure humane charity is unmistakable, of a feeling of duty to the helpless, whether young or old. The State had from the time of the Gracchi taken upon itself the immense burden of providing food for a quarter of a million of the proletariat of Rome. But in the days of Pliny it recognised fresh obligations. The importance of education and the growth of poverty appealed powerfully to a ruling class, which, under the influence of philosophy, was coming to believe more and more in the duty of benevolence and of devotion to things of the mind. All the emperors from Vespasian to M. Aurelius made liberal provision for the higher studies.(1093) But this endowment of culture, which in the end did harm as well as good, is not so interesting to us as the charitable foundations for the children of the poor. It was apparently the emperor Nerva, the rigid economist who sold the imperial furniture and jewels to replenish the treasury,(1094) who first made provision for the children of needy parents throughout Italy. But epigraphy tells us more than literary history of the charity of the emperors. The tablet of Veleia is a priceless record of the charitable measures adopted by Trajan. The motive of the great emperor was probably, as his panegyrist suggests, political as much as benevolent.(1095) He may have wished to encourage the rearing of children who should serve in the armies of the State, as well as to relieve distress. The provision was even more evidently intended to stimulate agriculture. The landed proprietors of the place, to the number of forty-six, received on mortgage a loan from the State of about £10,000 in our money, at an interest of five per cent, which was less than half the usual rate of that time.(1096) The interest was appropriated to the maintenance of 300 poor children, at the rate of about £1:11s. a year for each male child, and £1 for each girl. The illegitimate children, who, it may be noted, were only two or three out of so many, received a smaller allowance. The boys were supported till their eighteenth year, the girls till fourteen. It was a bold and sagacious attempt to encourage Italian agriculture, to check the ominous depopulation of Italy,(1097) and to answer the cry of the poor. Hadrian continued and even added to the benefaction of Trajan.(1098) Antoninus Pius, in honour of his wife Faustina, established a foundation for young girls who were to be called by her not altogether unspotted name.(1099) A similar charity was founded in honour of her daughter by M. Aurelius.(1100)

But, while the emperors were responding to the call of charity by using the resources of the State, it is clear, from the Letters of Pliny and from the inscriptions, that private benevolence was even more active. Pliny has a conception of the uses and responsibilities of wealth which, in spite of the teaching of Galilee, is not yet very common. Although he was not a very wealthy man, he acted up to his principles on a scale and proportion which only a few of our millionaires have yet reached. The lavish generosity of Pliny is a commonplace of social history. We have not the slightest wish to detract from the merited fame of that kindliest of Roman gentlemen. But a survey of the inscriptions may incline the inquirer to believe that, according to their means, there were many men and women in obscure municipalities all over the world, who were as generous and public-spirited as Pliny.(1101) With Pliny, as with those more obscure benefactors, the impelling motive was love for the parent city or the village which was the home of their race, and where the years of youth had been passed. Pliny, the distinguished advocate, the famous man of letters, the darling of Roman society, still remained the loyal son of Como, from which his love never strays.(1102) He followed and improved upon the example of his father in munificence to his native place.(1103) He had little liking for games and gladiatorial shows, which were the most popular objects of liberality in those days. But he gave a sum of nearly £9000 for the foundation of a town library, with an annual endowment of more than £800 to maintain it.(1104) Finding that promising youths of Como had to resort to Milan for their higher education, he offered to contribute one-third of the expense of a high school at Como, if the parents would raise the remainder. The letter which records the offer shows Pliny at his best, wise and thoughtful as well as generous.(1105) He wishes to keep boys under the protection of home influence, to make them lovers of their mother city; and he limits his benefaction in order to stimulate the interest of the parents in the cause of education, and in the appointment of the teachers. Another sum of between £4000 and £5000 he gave to Como for the support of boys and girls of the poorer class.(1106) He also left more than £4000 for public baths, and a sum of nearly £16,000 to his freedmen, and for communal feasts. On two of his estates he built or repaired temples at his own expense.(1107) His private benefactions were on a similar scale. It is not necessary to adopt the cynical conclusion that Pliny has told us all his liberality. The kindly delicacy with which Pliny claims the right of a second father to make up the dowry of the daughter of his friend Quintilian, might surely save him from such an imputation.(1108) In the same spirit he offers to Romatius Firmus the £2500 which was needed to raise his fortune to the level of equestrian rank.(1109) When the philosophers were banished by Domitian, Pliny, who was then praetor, at the most imminent risk visited his friend Artemidorus, and lent him, free of interest, a considerable sum of money.(1110) The daughter of one of his friends was left with an embarrassed estate; Pliny took up all the debts and left Calvina with an inheritance free from all burdens.(1111) He gave his old nurse a little estate which cost him about £800.(1112) But the amount of this good man’s gifts, which might shame a modern testator with ten times his fortune, is not so striking as the kindness which prompted them, and the modest delicacy with which they were made.

Yet Pliny, as we have said, is only a shining example of a numerous class of more obscure benefactors. For a thousand who know his Letters, there are few who have read the stone records of similar generosity. Yet these memorials abound for those who care to read them. And any one who will spend a few days, or even a few well-directed hours, in examining the inscriptions of the early Empire, will find many a common, self-complacent prejudice melting away. He will discover a profusion of generosity to add to the beauty, dignity, or convenience of the parent city, to lighten the dulness of ordinary life, to bring all ranks together in common scenes of enjoyment, to relieve want and suffering among the indigent. The motives of this extraordinary liberality were indeed often mixed, and it was, from our point of view, often misdirected. The gifts were sometimes made merely to win popularity, or to repay civic honours which had been conferred by the populace. They were too often devoted to gladiatorial shows and other exhibitions which only debased the spectators. Yet the greatest part of them were expended on objects of public utility—baths, theatres, markets, or new roads and aqueducts, or on those public banquets which knitted all ranks together. There was in those days an immense “civic ardour,” an almost passionate rivalry, to make the mother city a more pleasant and a more splendid home. The endless foundations for civic feasts to all orders, in which even children and slaves were not forgotten, with a distribution of money at the close, softened the sharp distinctions of rank, and gave an appreciable relief to poverty. Other foundations were more definitely inspired by charity and pity. In remote country towns, there were pious founders who, like Pliny and Trajan, and the Antonines, provided for the nurture of the children of the poor. Bequests were left to cheapen the main necessaries of life.(1113) Nor were the aged and the sick forgotten. In Lorium, near the old home of the Antonines, a humble spice dealer provided in his will for a free distribution of medicines to the poor people of the town.(1114) The countless gifts and legacies to the colleges, which were the refuge of the poor in that age, in every region of the Roman world, are an irresistible proof of an overflowing charity. Pliny’s love of the quiet town where his infancy was passed, and the record of a like patriotism or benevolence in so many others, draw us on to the study of that free and generous municipal life which was the great glory of the Antonine age.

II. MUNICIPAL LIFE

Nearly all the intimate friends of Pliny were, like himself, bred in the country, and, as we have seen, he has left us a priceless picture of that rural aristocracy in the calm refinement of their country seats. But of the ordinary life of the provincial town we learn very little from Pliny. Indeed, the silence of Roman literature generally as to social life outside the capital is very remarkable.(1115) In the long line of great Latin authors from Ennius to Juvenal, there is hardly one whose native place was Rome. The men who are the glory of Roman letters in epic and lyric poetry, in oratory and history, in comedy and satire, were born in quiet country towns in Italy or the remoter provinces. But the reminiscences of the scenes of their infancy will generally be found to be faint and rare. Horace, indeed, displays a tender piety for that borderland of Apulia, where, in the glades of Mount Vultur as a child, he drank inspiration from the witchery of haunted groves.(1116) And Martial, the hardened man about town, never forgot the oak groves and iron foundries of Bilbilis.(1117) But for the municipal system and life, the relations of its various social grades, the humdrum routine of the shops and forums, the rustic rites and deities,(1118) the lingering echoes of that dim common life with its vices and honest tenderness, its petty ambitions or hopeless griefs, we must generally go to the records in stone, and the remains of buried cities which the spade has given back to the light.

This silence of the literary class is not due to any want of love in the Roman for the calm and freshness and haunting charm of country scenes, still less to callousness towards old associations. Certainly Virgil cannot be charged with any such lack of sensibility. In the Eclogues and the Georgics, the memory of the old farm at Andes breaks through the more conventional sentiment of Alexandrian tradition. In the scenery of these poems, there are “mossy fountains and grass softer than sleep,” the hues of violet, poppy, and hyacinth, the shade of ancient ilex, and the yellow wealth of cornfield. We hear the murmur of bees, “the moan of doves in immemorial elms,” the rush of the river, the whispering of the wind. The pastoral charm of the midsummer prime is there, from the freshness of fields under the morning star, through the hours alive with the song of the cicala and the lowing of the herds around the pool, through the still, hot, vacant noontide, till the moonbeams are glinting on the dewy grasses of the glades.(1119) Nor can any lover of Virgil ever forget the fire of old sentiment in the muster of Italian chivalry in the seventh book of the Aeneid.(1120) Tibur and Praeneste, Anagnia, Nomentum, and Amiternum, and many another old Sabine town, which send forth their young warriors to the fray, are each stamped on the imagination by some grace of natural beauty, or some glory of ancient legend. In the Flavian period, as we have seen, the great nobles had their villas on every pleasant site, wherever sea or hill or woodland offered a fair prospect and genial air. To these scenes they hastened, like emancipated schoolboys, when the dog-days set in. They had a genuine love of the unspoilt countryside, with its simple natural pleasures, its husbandry of the olden time, its joyous plenty, above all its careless freedom and repose.(1121) The great charm of a rural retreat was its distance from the “noise and smoke and wealth” of Rome. The escape from the penalties of fame, from the boredom of interminable dinners, the intrusive importunity of curious busybodies, the malice of jealous rivals, gives a fresh zest to the long tranquil days under the ilex shade among the Sabine hills.(1122) Horace probably felt more keenly than Juvenal the charm of hill and stream and the scenes of rustic toils and gaiety. Yet the exquisite good sense of Horace would have recoiled from the declamatory extravagance with which Juvenal justifies his friend’s retirement from the capital, by a realistic picture of all its sordid troubles and vices and absurdities.(1123) “To love Rome at Tibur and Tibur at Rome” was the expression of the educated Roman’s feelings in a form which he would have recognised to be as just as it was happy. In spite of the charm of the country, to any real man of letters or affairs, the fascination of Rome was irresistible. Pliny, and no doubt hundreds of his class, from Augustus to Theodosius, grumbled at the wasteful fashion in which their lives were frittered away by monotonous social duties, as imperious as they were generally vain.(1124) Yet to Pliny, as to Symmachus, the prospect of never again seeing the city, so seductive and so wearying, would have been absolutely intolerable. Martial, when he retired to Bilbilis, seems to pity his friend Juvenal, wandering restlessly through the noisy Suburra, or climbing the Caelian in hot haste, to hang on the outskirts of a levee.(1125) Yet in the preface to this last book, Martial seems to feel his banishment as keenly as Ovid felt his among the frozen rivers of Scythia.(1126) He misses in the “provincial solitude” the sympathetic public which was eager for his latest epigram, the fine critical judgment to appreciate, the concourse of elegant idlers to supply the matter for his verses.(1127) And worst of all, the most famous wit of Rome is now the mark for the ignorant spite and envy of a provincial clique. Martial evidently feels very much as Dr. Johnson would have felt if he had been compelled to live out his days in Skye. Juvenal may affect to regret the simple ways of those rustic places, where on festal days in the grass-grown theatre the infant in his mother’s arms shudders at the awful masks of the actors, and the aediles take their places in white tunics like the humble crowd.(1128) But, in spite of this sentiment, the true Roman had a certain contempt for municipal life,(1129) for the narrow range of its interests, the ludicrous assumption of dignity by its petty magistrates, and its provincialisms.(1130) It was indeed only natural that the splendour and the vivid energy of life in the capital of the world should throw provincial life into the shade. Yet we can realise now, as a Roman wit or man of fashion could hardly do, that the municipal system, which had overspread the world from the Solway to the edge of the Sahara, was not the least glory of the Antonine age. And in any attempt to estimate the moral condition of the masses in that age, the influence of municipal life should occupy a large place.

It is beyond the scope of this work to trace provincial towns through all their various grades, and their evolution in the hands of Roman statesmanship from the time of Augustus. What we are chiefly concerned with is the spirit and the rapid development of that brilliant civic life, which not only covered the worlds both of East and West with material monuments of Roman energy, but profoundly influenced for good, or sometimes for evil, the popular character. The magical transformation wrought by Roman rule in a century and a half seized the imagination of contemporaries such as the rhetor Aristides. And the mere wreck of that brilliant civilisation which now meets the traveller’s eye, in regions that have long returned to waste, will not permit us to treat his eulogy of Rome as only a piece of rhetoric. Regions, once desert solitudes, are thickly dotted with flourishing cities; the Empire is a realm of cities. The world has laid the sword aside, and keeps universal festival, with all pomp and gladness. All other feuds and rivalries are gone, and cities now vie with one another only in their splendour and their pleasures. Every space is crowded with porticoes, gymnasia, temple fronts, with studios and schools.(1131) Sandy wastes, trackless mountains, and broad rivers present no barriers to the traveller, who finds his home and country everywhere. The earth has become a vast pleasure garden.(1132)

This glowing description of the Roman world of the Antonine age is not perhaps strengthened by the appeal to the doubtful statistics of other contemporaries, such as Aelian and Josephus. We may hesitate to accept the statement that Italy had once 1197 cities, or that Gaul possessed 1200.(1133) In these estimates, if they have any solid foundation, the term “city” must be taken in a very elastic sense. But there are other more trustworthy reckonings which sufficiently support the glowing description of Aristides. When the Romans conquered Spain and Gaul, they found a system of pagi or cantons, with very few considerable towns. The 800 towns which are said to have been taken by Julius Caesar can have been little more than villages. But the Romanisation of both countries meant centralisation. Where the Romans did not find towns they created them.(1134) Gradually, but rapidly, the isolated rural life became more social and urban. In the north-eastern province of Spain, out of 293 communities in the time of the elder Pliny, 179 were in some sense urban, 114 were still purely rustic;(1135) and we may be sure that this is an immense advance on the condition of the country at the time of the conquest. In the reign of Antoninus Pius, only 27 of these rural districts remained without an organised civic centre.(1136) In Gaul, Julius Caesar impressed the stamp of Rome on the province of Narbo, by founding cities of the Roman type, and his policy was continued by Augustus. The loose cantonal system almost disappeared from the province in the south, although it lingered long in the northern regions of Gaul. Yet even in the north, on the borders of Germany, Cologne, from the reign of Claudius, became the envy of the barbarians across the Rhine,(1137) and Trèves, from the days of Augustus, already anticipated its glory as a seat of empire from Diocletian to Gratian and Valentinian.(1138) In the Agri Decumates, between the Rhine and Neckar, the remains of baths and aqueducts, the mosaics and bronzes and pottery, which antiquarian industry has collected and explored, attest the existence of at least 160 flourishing and civilised communities.(1139) Baden was already a crowded resort for its healing waters when, in A.D. 69, it was given up to fire and sword by Caecina in his advance to meet the army of Otho in the valley of the Po.(1140) The Danube was lined with flourishing communities of Roman origin. In the 170 years during which Dacia was included in the Empire, more than 120 towns were organised by the conquering race.(1141) Greek cities, like Tomi on the Euxine, record their gratitude to their patrons in the same formal terms as Pompeii or Venusia.(1142) If we may believe Philostratus, there were 500 flourishing cities in the province of Asia which more than rivalled the splendour of Ionia before the Lydian and Persian conquests.(1143) Many of these were of ancient origin, but many had been founded by Rome.(1144) Laodicea was regarded as an unimportant place in the reign of Tiberius; yet the wealth of its private citizens was celebrated.(1145) One of them had attained a fortune which enabled him to bequeath it a sum of nearly half a million. The elder Pliny could reckon 40 cities of importance in Egypt, which had in his time a population of over seven millions;(1146) and Alexandria, next after Rome herself, was regarded as the most dazzling ornament of the Empire.(1147)

Perhaps nowhere, however, had the “Roman peace” worked greater miracles of civic prosperity than in North Africa. That the population of Roman Africa was in the period of the Empire extraordinarily dense, appears from the number of its episcopal sees, which in the fifth century had reached a total of 297.(1148) The remains of more than 20 amphitheatres can still be traced. There is indeed no more startling proof of the range and sweep of Roman civilisation than the wreck of those capitols, forums, aqueducts, and temples in what are now sandy solitudes, not even occupied by a native village. In the province of Numidia, within a few leagues of the Sahara, the Roman colony of Thamugadi (Timgad) was founded, as an inscription tells, by Trajan in the year 100.(1149) There, in what is now a scene of utter loneliness and desolation, the remains of a busy and well-organised community have been brought to light by French explorers. The town was built by the third legion, which for generations, almost as a hereditary caste, protected Roman civilisation against the restless tribes of the desert. The chief buildings were probably completed in 117. The preservation of so much, after eighteen centuries, is a proof that the work was well and thoroughly done. The ruts of carriage wheels can still be seen in the main street, which is spanned by a triumphal arch, adorned with marble columns. Porticoes and colonnades gave shelter from the heat to the passers-by, and two fountains played at the further end. Water, which is now invisible on the spot, was then brought in channels from the hills, and distributed at a fixed rate among private houses.(1150) The forum was in the usual style, with raised side walks and porticoes, a basilica, a senate-house and rostrum, a shrine of Fortuna Augusta, and a crowd of statues to the emperors from M. Aurelius to Julian.(1151) This petty place had its theatre, where the seats can still be seen rising in their due gradation of rank. An imposing capitol, in which, as at home, the Roman Trinity, Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, were duly worshipped, was restored in the reign of Valentinian I., and dedicated by that Publius Caeionius Albinus who was one of the last of the pagan aristocracy, and who figures in the Letters of Symmachus and the Saturnalia of Macrobius.(1152) The inscriptions on the site reveal the regular municipal constitution, with the names of seventy decurions, each of whom probably paid his honorarium of £13 or more when he entered on his office.(1153) The honours of the duumvirate and the aedileship cost respectively £32 and £24.(1154) And here, as elsewhere, the public monuments and buildings were generally erected by private ambition or munificence. A statue and little shrine of Fortuna Augusta were given by two ladies, at a cost of over £200, in the days of Hadrian.(1155)

The greatest glory of the imperial administration for nearly two centuries was the skilful and politic tolerance with which it reconciled a central despotism with a remarkable range of local liberty. It did not attempt to impose a uniform organisation or a bureaucratic control on the vast mass of races and peoples whom the fortune of Rome had brought under her sway. Rather, for ages its guiding principle was, as far as possible, to leave ancient landmarks undisturbed, and to give as much free play to local liberties as was compatible with the safety and efficiency of the imperial guardian of order and peace. Hence those many diversities in the relation between provincial towns and Rome, represented by the names of free, federate, or stipendiary cities, municipium and colonia. Many retained their old laws, constitution, and judicial system.(1156) They retained in some cases the names of magistracies, which recalled the days of independence: there were still archons at Athens, suffetes in African towns, demarchs at Naples. The title of medixtuticus still lingered here and there in old Oscan communities.(1157) When she had crushed the national spirit, and averted the danger of armed revolt, Rome tolerated, and even fostered, municipal freedom, for more than a hundred years after the last shadowy pretence of popular government had disappeared from her own forum.(1158) Central control and uniformity were established in those departments which affected the peace and welfare of the whole vast commonwealth. Although the interference of the provincial governor in local administration was theoretically possible in varying degrees, yet it may well be doubted whether a citizen of Lyons or Marseilles, of Antioch or Alexandria, was often made conscious of any limitation of his freedom by imperial power. While delation and confiscation and massacre were working havoc on the banks of the Tiber, the provinces were generally tranquil and prosperous. The people elected their magistrates, who administered municipal affairs with little interference from government. The provincial administration of a Nero, an Otho, a Vitellius, or a Domitian was often no less prudent and considerate than that of a Vespasian or a Trajan.(1159) And the worst of the emperors share with the best in the universal gratitude of the provinces for the blessings of the “Roman peace.”(1160)

But although for generations there was a settled abstinence from centralisation on the part of the imperial government, the many varieties of civic constitution in the provinces tended by an irresistible drift to a uniform type of organisation. Free and federate communities voluntarily sought the position of a colony or a municipium.(1161) Just as the provincial town must have its capitol, with the cult of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, or imported the street names Velabrum or Vicus Tuscus, so the little community called itself respublica, its commons the populus, its curia the senate or the amplissimus et splendidissimus ordo; its magistrates sometimes bore the majestic names of praetor, dictator, or censor, in a few cases even of consul.(1162) This almost ludicrous imitation of the great city is an example of the magical power which Rome always exercised on her most distant subjects, and even on the outer world of barbarism, down to the last days when her forces were ebbing away. The ease and rapidity of communication along the great routes, the frequent visits of proconsuls and procurators and generals, with the numerous train which attended them, the presence of the ubiquitous Roman merchant and traveller, kept even remote places in touch with the capital. The acta diurna, with official news and bits of scandal and gossip, regularly arrived in distant provincial towns and frontier camps.(1163) The last speech of Pliny, or the freshest epigrams of Martial, were within a short time selling on the bookstalls of Lyons or Vienne.(1164) Until the appearance of railways and steamboats, it may be doubted whether there was any age in history in which travelling was easier or more general.

Apart from the immense stimulus which was given to trade and commerce by the pacification of the world, liberal curiosity, or restless ennui, or the passion to preach and propagate ideas, carried immense numbers to the most distant lands.(1165) The travelling sophist found his way to towns on the edge of the Scythian steppes, to the home of the Brahmans, or to the depths of the Soudan.(1166) The tour up the Nile was part of a liberal culture in the days of Lucian as it was in the days of Herodotus. The romantic charm of travel in Greece was probably heightened for many by the tales of Thessalian brigands and sorceresses which meet us in the novel of Apuleius. The Emperor Hadrian, who visited almost every interesting scene in his dominions, from the Solway to the Euphrates, often trudging for days at the head of his soldiers, is a true representative of the migratory tastes of his time. Seneca, indeed, finds in this rage for change of scene only a symptom of the universal unrest. Epictetus, on the other hand, and Aristides expatiate with rapture on the universal security and wellbeing, due to the disappearance of brigandage, piracy, and war. The seas are alive with merchantmen; deserts have become populous scenes of industry; the great roads are carried over the broadest rivers and the most defiant mountain barriers. The earth has become the common possession of all. Nor is this mere rhetoric. Travelling to all parts of the known world had become expeditious, and even luxurious. From the Second Punic War, traders, couriers, and travellers had moved freely along the great roads.(1167) The government post, which was first organised by Augustus on the model of the Persian, provided at regular intervals the means of conveyance for officials, or for those furnished with the requisite diploma. Private enterprise had also organised facilities of travel, and at the gates of country towns such as Pompeii, Praeneste, or Tibur, there were stations of the posting corporations (the cisiarii or jumentarii) where carriages could be hired, with change of horses at each stage.(1168) The speed with which great distances were traversed in those days is at first sight rather startling. Caesar once travelled 100 miles a day in a journey from Rome to the Rhone.(1169) The freedman Icelus in seven days carried the news of Nero’s death to Galba in Spain,(1170) the journey of 332 miles from Tarraco to Clunia having been made at the rate of nearly ten miles an hour. This of course was express speed. The ordinary rate of travelling is probably better represented by the leisurely journey of Horace and Maecenas to Brundisium, or that of Martial’s book from Tarraco to Bilbilis.(1171) About 130 miles a day was the average distance accomplished by sea. Vessels put out from Ostia or Puteoli for every port in the Mediterranean. From Puteoli to Corinth was a voyage of five days. About the same time was needed to reach Tarraco from Ostia. A ship might arrive at Alexandria from the Palus Maeotis in a fortnight.(1172) Many a wandering sophist, like Dion Chrysostom or Apollonius of Tyana, traversed great distances on foot, or with a modest wallet on a mule. The rhetor Aristides once spent a hundred days in a journey at mid-winter from Mysia to Rome.(1173) But there was hardly any limit to the luxury and ostentatious splendour with which the great and opulent made their progresses, attended or preceded by troops of footmen and runners, and carrying with them costly plate and myrrhine vases.(1174) The thousand carriages which Nero took with him on a progress, the silver-shod mules of Poppaea, the paraphernalia of luxury described by Seneca, if they are not mythical, were probably the exceptional displays of a self-indulgence bordering on lunacy.(1175) But practical and sensible comfort in travelling was perhaps then commoner than it was, until quite recently, among ourselves. The carriages in which the two indefatigable Plinies used to ride, enabled them to read at their ease, or dictate to an amanuensis.(1176) The inns, from the time of Horace to the time of Sidonius, were as a rule bad, and frequently disreputable, and even dangerous, places of resort.(1177) And vehicles were often arranged for sleeping on a journey. We may be sure that many an imperial officer after the time of Julius Caesar passed nights in his carriage, while hurrying to join the forces on the Rhine or the Danube. With all this rapid circulation of officials and travellers, the far-stretching limits of the Roman world must, to the general eye, have contracted, the remotest places were drawn more and more towards the centre, and the inexhaustible vitality of the imperial city diffused itself with a magical power of silent transformation.

The modes in which the fully developed municipalities of the Antonine age had originated and were organised were very various. Wherever, as in the Greek East or Carthaginian Africa, towns already existed, the Romans, of course, used them in their organisation of a province, although they added liberally to the number, as in Syria, Pontus, and Cappadocia.(1178) Where a country was still in the cantonal state, the villages or markets were grouped around a civic centre, and a municipal town, such as Nîmes or Lyons, would thus become the metropolis of a considerable tract of territory. The colony of Vienne was the civic centre of the Allobroges.(1179) In the settlement of the Alps many of the remote mountain cantons were attached to towns such as Tridentum, Verona, or Brixia.(1180) Sometimes, as in Dacia, the civic organisation was created at a stroke.(1181) But it is well known that, especially towards the frontiers of the Empire, in Britain, on the Rhine, and in North Africa, the towns of the second century had often grown out of the castra stativa of the legions.

The great reorganisation of Augustus had made each legion a permanent corps, with a history and identity of its own. To ensure the tranquillity of the Empire the legions were distributed in permanent camps along the frontier, the only inland cities with a regular military garrison being Lyons and Carthage.(1182) Many legions never changed their quarters for generations. The Tertia Augusta, which has left so many memorials of itself in the inscriptions of Lambaesis, remained, with only a single break, in the same district from the time of Augustus to that of Diocletian.(1183) There, for two generations, it kept sleepless watch against the robber tribes of the Sahara. The legion was also peacefully employed in erecting fortifications and making roads and bridges, when the camp was visited by Hadrian in the year 130.(1184) Gradually soldiers were allowed to form family relations, more or less regular, until, under Septimius Severus, the legionary was permitted to live in his household like any other citizen.(1185) From the remains at Lambaesis, it is now considered certain that, in the third century, the camp had ceased to be the soldier’s home. The suttlers and camp-followers had long gathered in the neighbourhood of the camp, in huts which were called Canabae legionis. There, for a long time, the soldier, when off duty, sought his pleasures and amusements, and there, after the changes of Septimius Severus, he took up his abode. At first the Canabae of Lambaesis was only a vicus; it became, under Marcus Aurelius, a municipium—the Respublica Lambaesitanorum, with the civic constitution which is rendered familiar to us by so many inscriptions.(1186) The Legionaries seem to have been happy and contented at Lambaesis; their sons were trained to arms and followed their fathers in the ranks;(1187) the legion became to some extent a hereditary caste. Old veterans remained on the scene of their service, after receiving their discharge with a pension from the chest.(1188) The town developed in the regular fashion, and dignified itself by a capitol, an amphitheatre, two forums, a triumphal arch; and the many monuments of public and private life found on the site reveal a highly organised society, moulded out of barbarous and alien elements, and stamped with the inimitable and enduring impress of Rome. Out of such casual and unpromising materials sprang numbers of urban communities, which reproduced, in their outline and in their social tone, the forms and spirit of the free Republic of Rome. The capitol and the forum are merely the external symbols of a closer bond of parentage. The Roman military discipline did not more completely master and transform the Numidian or Celtic recruit, than the inspiration of her civil polity diffused among races imbruted by servitude, or instinct with the love of a lawless, nomadic freedom, the sober attachment to an ordered civic life which was obedient to a long tradition, yet vividly interested in its own affairs.

On hardly any side of ancient life is the information furnished by the inscriptions so rich as on the spirit and organisation of municipalities. Here one may learn details of communal life which are never alluded to in Roman literature. From this source, also, we must seek the only authentic materials for the reconstruction of a municipality of the first century. The Album Canusii and the tablets containing the laws of Malaga and Salpensa have not only settled more than one question as to the municipal organisation of the early Empire, but have enabled us to form almost as clear-cut a conception of it as we have of the corporate organisation of our own great towns.

But, unlike our civic republics, the Roman municipal town was distinctly aristocratic, or rather timocratic, in its constitution. A man’s place in the community, as a rule, was fixed by his ancestry, his official grade, or his capacity to spend. The dictum of Trimalchio was too literally true in the municipal life of that age—“a man is what he is worth.” Provincial society was already parted and graduated, though less decidedly, by those rigid lines of materialistic demarcation which became gaping fissures in the society of the Theodosian code. The Curia or Senate was open only to the possessor of a certain fortune; at Como, for instance, HS.100,000, elsewhere perhaps even more. On the other hand, the richest freedman could not become a member of the Curia or hold any civic magistracy,(1189) although he might be decorated with their insignia. His ambition had to be satisfied with admission to the order of the Augustales, which ranked socially after the members of the Curia. In the list of the Curia, which was revised every five years, the order of official and social precedence was most scrupulously observed. In the Album Canusii of the year A.D. 223,(1190) the first rank is assigned to thirty-nine patrons, who have held imperial office, or who are senators or knights. Next come the local magnates who have been dignified by election to any of the four great municipal magistracies. Last in order are the pedani, that is, the citizens possessing the requisite qualification, who have not yet held any municipal office. At the bottom of the list stand twenty-five praetextati, who were probably the sons of the more distinguished citizens, and who, like the sons of senators of the Republic, were silent witnesses of the proceedings in the Curia. From this body, and from all the magistracies, all persons engaged in certain mean or disgraceful occupations were expressly excluded, along with the great mass of the poorer citizens, the tenuiores. The taint of servile birth, the possession of libertinae opes, was an indelible blot. In countless inscriptions this gradation of rank is sharply accentuated. If a man leaves a bequest for an annual feast, with a distribution of money, the rich patron or the decurio will receive perhaps five times the amount which is doled out to the simple plebeian.(1191) The distinction of rank, even in punishment for crime, which meets us everywhere in the Theodosian Code, has already appeared. The honestior is not to be degraded by the punishment of crucifixion or by the stroke of the rod.(1192) But it is on their tombs that the passion of the Romans for some sort of distinction, however shadowy, shows itself most strikingly. On these slabs every grade of dignity in a long career is enumerated with minute care. The exact value of a man’s public benefactions or his official salary will be recorded with pride.(1193) Even the dealer in aromatics or in rags will make a boast of some petty office in the college of his trade.(1194) But, although rank and office were extravagantly valued in these societies, wealth was after all the great distinction. The cities were in the hands of the rich, and, in return for social deference and official power, the rich were expected to give lavishly to all public objects. The worship of wealth, the monumental flattery of rich patrons and benefactors, was very interested and servile. On the other hand, there probably never was a time when the duties of wealth were so powerfully enforced by opinion, or so cheerfully, and even recklessly, performed.

Yet, although these communities were essentially aristocratic in tone and constitution, the commonalty still retained some power in the Antonine age. On many inscriptions they appear side by side with the Curial “ordo” and the Augustales.(1195) They had still in the reign of Domitian the right to elect their magistrates. It was long believed that, with the suppression of popular elections at Rome in the reign of Tiberius, the popular choice of their great magistrates must also have been withdrawn from municipal towns.(1196) This has now been disproved by the discovery of the laws of Malaga and Salpensa, in which the most elaborate provisions are made for a free and uncontaminated election by the whole people.(1197) And we can still almost hear the noise of election days among the ruins of Pompeii.(1198) Many of the inscriptions of Pompeii are election placards, recommending particular candidates. There, in red letters painted on the walls, we can read that “the barbers wish to have Trebius as aedile,” or that “the fruit-sellers, with one accord, support the candidature of Holconius Priscus for the duumvirate.” The porters, muleteers, and garlic dealers have each their favourite. The master fuller, Vesonius Primus, backs Cn. Helvius as a worthy man. Even ladies took part in the contest and made their separate appeals. “His little sweetheart” records that she is working for Claudius.(1199) Personal popularity no doubt then, as always, attracted such electoral support. But the student of the inscriptions may be inclined to think that the free and independent electors had also a keen eye for the man who was likely to build a new colonnade for the forum, or a new schola for the guild, or, best of all, to send down thirty pairs of gladiators into the arena “with plenty of blood.”(1200)

The laws of Malaga and Salpensa prescribe, in the fullest detail, all the forms to be observed in the election of magistrates. These were generally six in number—two duumvirs,(1201) who were the highest officers, two aediles, and two quaestors, for each year. Every fifth year, instead of the duumvirs, two quinquennales were elected, with the extraordinary duty of conducting the municipal census.(1202) The candidates for all these offices were required to be free born, of the age of twenty-five at least, of irreproachable character, and the possessors of a certain fortune. The qualifications were the same as those prescribed by the lex Julia for admission to the municipal Senate, which expressly excluded persons engaged in certain disreputable callings—gladiators, actors, pimps, auctioneers, and undertakers.(1203) In the best days the competition for office was undoubtedly keen, and the candidates were numerous. In the year A.D. 4, the year of the death of C. Caesar, the grandson of Augustus, so hot was the rivalry that the town of Pisa was left without magistrates owing to serious disturbances at the elections.(1204) But it is an ominous fact that the law of Malaga, in the reign of Domitian, makes provision for the contingency of a failure of candidates. In such a case the presiding duumvir was to nominate the required number, they in turn an equal number, and the combined nominees had to designate a third set equal in number to themselves. The choice of the people was then restricted to these involuntary candidates. The city has evidently advanced a stage towards the times of the Lower Empire, when the magistrates were appointed by the Curia from among themselves, with no reference to the people.(1205) A man might, indeed, well hesitate before offering himself for an office which imposed a heavy expenditure on the holder of it. The honorarium payable on admission amounted, in an obscure place like Thamugadi, to about £32 for the duumvirate, and £24 for the aedileship.(1206) In the greater Italian cities it probably would be much more; at Pompeii the newly elected duumvir paid more than £80.(1207) But the man chosen by the people often felt bound to outstrip the bare demands of law or custom by a prodigal liberality. He must build or repair some public work, to signalise his year of office, and, at the dedication of it, good taste required him to exhibit costly games, or to give a banquet to the citizens, with a largess to all of every rank small or great.(1208)

But in return for its liabilities, the position of a duumvir gave undoubted power and distinction. The office was the image or shadow of the ancient consulship, and occasionally, as the inscriptions attest, a Hadrian or an Antoninus Pius did not disdain to accept it.(1209) The duumvirs commanded the local militia, when it was, on emergency, called out.(1210) They presided at meetings of the people and the Curia, they proposed questions for their deliberation, and carried the decrees into effect. They had civil jurisdiction up to a certain amount, and their criminal jurisdiction, which, in the third century, had been transferred to imperial functionaries, was, according to the most probable opinion, undiminished at least down to the end of the first century.(1211) This judicial power, however, was limited by the intercessio of colleagues and the right of appeal. They had extensive responsibilities in finance, for the collection of dues and taxes, and the recovery of all moneys owing to the municipality.(1212) After the fall of the free Republic, when so many avenues of ambition were closed, many an able man might well satisfy his desire for power and distinction by the duumvirate of a provincial town.

The Curia, or local senate, is peculiarly interesting to the historical student, because it was to the conversion of the curiales into a hereditary caste, loaded with incalculable liabilities, that the decay of the Western Empire was to a large extent due.(1213) But, in the reign of Domitian, the Curia is still erect and dignified. Although the individual decurio seldom or never assumes the title senator in the inscriptions,(1214) the Curia as a whole often bears the august name and titles of the majestic Roman Senate.(1215) And assuredly down to the middle of the second century there was no lack of candidates for admission. Every five years the roll of the Curia was revised and drawn up afresh by the quinquennales. The conditions were those for holding a magistracy, including a property qualification, which varied in different places.(1216) The number of ordinary members was generally 100.(1217) But it was swelled by patrons and other extraordinary members. The quinquennales, in framing the list, took first the members on the roll of the previous term, and then those who had been elected to magistracies since the last census. If any vacancies were still left, they were filled up from the ranks of those who, not having yet held any municipal office, were otherwise qualified by the possession of a sufficient fortune.(1218) In the Album Canusii, the men who had held official rank constitute at least two-thirds of the Curia. In the composition of such a body there would appear to be ample security for administrative skill and experience. And yet we shall find that it was precisely through want of prudence or skill that the door was opened for that bureaucratic interference which, in the second century, began, with momentous results, to sap the freedom and independence of municipal life.

The honours and powers of the provincial council were long sufficient to compensate the decurio for the heavy demands made upon his generosity. To all but comparatively few the career of imperial office and distinction was closed. His own town became each man’s “patria,” as Como was even to a man like Pliny, who played so great a part in the life of the capital.(1219) There is the ring of a very genuine public spirit and a love for the local commonwealth in a host of the inscriptions of that age.(1220) The vastness and overwhelming grandeur of a world-wide Empire, in which the individual citizen was a mere atom, made men crave for any distinction which seemed to raise them above the grey flat level which surrounds a democratic despotism. And even the ordinary decurio had some badges to mark him off from the crowd. The pompous honorific titles of the Lower Empire, indeed, had not come into vogue. But the Curial had a place of honour at games and festivals, a claim to a larger share in the distributions of money by private benefactors, exemption, as one of the honestiores, from the more degrading forms of punishment, the free supply of water from the public sources,(1221) and other perquisites and honours, which varied in different localities. The powers of the Curia were also very considerable. The duumvirs indeed possessed extensive prerogatives which strong men may have sometimes strained.(1222) But there was a right of appeal to the Curia from judicial decisions of the duumvirs in certain cases. And their control of games and festivals, and of the finances of the community, was limited by the necessity of consulting the Curia and of carrying out its orders.(1223) In the lex Ursonensis we find a long list of matters on which the duumvirs were obliged to take their instructions from the Curia.(1224) The quorum needed for a valid decision varied in different places. In the election of a patron a quorum of two-thirds of the decurions was legally required.(1225) The names of the duoviri appeared at the head of every curial decree, as those of the consuls in every senatusconsultum.

After the local aristocracy of curial rank came, in order of social precedence, members of the knightly class and the order of the Augustales. In the latter half of the first century equestrian rank had been conferred with perhaps too lavish a hand. And satire was never tired of ridiculing these sham aristocrats, Bithynian knights as they were called, often of the lowest origin, who on public occasions vulgarly asserted their mushroom rank.(1226) In particular, the army contributed many new knights to the society of the provincial towns. A veteran, often of humble birth, who had risen to the first place among the sixty centurions of a legion, was, on his discharge with a good pension, sometimes raised to equestrian rank. He frequently returned to his native place, where he became a personage of some mark. Such men, along with old officers of higher grade, frequently appear in the inscriptions invested with priesthoods and high magistracies,(1227) and were sometimes chosen as patrons of the community.(1228) Many of them were undoubtedly good and public-spirited men, with the peculiar virtues which the life of the Roman camp engendered. But some of their class also displayed that coarse and brutal self-assertion, and that ignorant contempt for the refinement of culture, on which Persius and Juvenal poured their scorn.(1229)

The Augustales, ranking next to the curial order, are peculiarly interesting, both as representing the wide diffusion of the cult of the emperors, and as a class composed of men of low, or even servile origin, who had made their fortunes in trade, yet whose ambition society found the means of satisfying, without breaking down the barriers of aristocratic exclusiveness.(1230) The origin of the order of the Augustales was long a subject of debate. But it has now been placed beyond doubt that in the provincial towns it was a plebeian institution for the cult of Augustus, and succeeding emperors, modelled on the aristocratic order of the Sodales Augustales, which was established by Tiberius in the capital.(1231) The Augustales were elected by vote of the local curia, without regard to social rank, although probably with due respect to wealth, and they included the leaders of the great freedman class, whose emergence is one of the most striking facts in the social history of the time. Figuring on scores of inscriptions, the Augustales are mentioned only once in extant Roman literature, in the novel of Petronius, where the class has been immortalised, and probably caricatured.(1232) The inscription, for which Trimalchio gives an order to his brother Augustal, the stone-cutter, is to record his election in absence to the Sevirate, his many virtues and his millions. Actual monuments at Assisi and Brescia show that Trimalchio was not an altogether imaginary person.(1233)

Yet the Augustales, in spite of the vulgar ostentation and self-assertion, which have characterised similar classes of the nouveaux riches in all ages, were a very important and useful order. They overspread the whole Roman world in the West. Their monuments have been traced, not only in almost every town in Italy, and in great provincial capitals, like Lyons or Tarraco, but in Alpine valleys and lonely outposts of civilisation on the edge of the Sahara.(1234) Their special religious duties involved considerable expense, from which no doubt the more aristocratic class were glad to be relieved. They had to bear the cost of sacrifices and festivities on certain days in honour of dead emperors. They had to pay an entrance fee on admission to the college, which the ambitious among them would often lavishly exceed.(1235) They were organised on the lines of other colleges, with patrons, quinquennales, and other officials. They had their club-houses where their banquets were regularly held, they possessed landed property, and had their common places of burial.(1236) But their expenditure and their interests were by no means limited to their own immediate society. They regarded themselves, and were generally treated as public officials, ranking next to the magistrates of the Curia. They had the right to wear the purple-bordered toga, and to have lictors attending them in the streets.(1237) Places of honour were reserved for them at the games and festivals. Although as a class they were not eligible for a seat in the Curia, or for the municipal magistracies, yet the ornamenta, the external badges and honours attached to these offices, were sometimes granted even to freedmen who had done service to the community. Thus an Augustal who had paved a road at Cales received the ornamenta of a decurio.(1238) And another, for his munificence to Pompeii, by a decree of the Curia, was awarded the use of the bisellium, a seat of honour which was usually reserved for the highest dignitaries.(1239) But the ornaments and dignities of their own particular college became objects of pride and ambition. Thus a man boasts of having been made primus Augustalis perpetuus, by a decree of the Curia.(1240) A worthy of Brundisium received from the Curia a public funeral, with the ornaments and insignia of an Augustal.(1241) In this way, in a society highly conventional, and dominated by caste feeling, the order of the Augustales provided both a stimulus and a reward for the public spirit of a new class, powerful in its wealth and numbers, but generally encumbered by the heritage of a doubtful origin. It was a great elevation for a man, who, perhaps, had been sold as a boy in some Syrian slave market into the degradation of a minion, and who had emerged, by petty savings or base services, into the comparative freedom of a tainted or despised trade, to find himself at last holding a conspicuous rank in his municipality, and able to purchase honour and deference from those who had trampled on him in his youth.

The Augustales shared with the members of the Curia the heavy burdens which public sentiment then imposed upon the rich. Direct taxation for municipal purposes was in the first century almost unknown. The municipalities often possessed landed property, mines, or quarries. Capua is said to have had distant possessions in the island of Crete.(1242) The towns also derived an income from the public baths,(1243) from the rent of shops and stalls in the public places, from the supply of water to private houses or estates, and from port dues and tolls. A very considerable item of revenue must have been found in the fee which all decurions, Augustales, and magistrates paid on entering on their office or dignity. Since the reign of Nerva, the towns had the right of receiving legacies and bequests.(1244) And, on the occurrence of any desolating calamity, an earthquake or a fire, the emperor was never slow or niggardly in giving relief. In the year 53 A.D. the town of Bologna received an imperial subsidy of about £83,000.(1245) The cities of Asia were again and again relieved after desolating earthquakes.(1246)

With regard to municipal expenditure, the budget was free from many public charges which burden our modern towns. The higher offices were unpaid, and in fact demanded large generosity from their holders. The lower functions were discharged, to a great extent, by communal slaves. The care or construction of streets, markets, and public buildings, although theoretically devolving on the community through their aediles, was, as a matter of fact, to an enormous extent undertaken by private persons. The city treasury must have often incurred a loss in striving to provide corn and oil for the citizens at a limited price, and the authorities were often reviled, as at Trimalchio’s banquet, for not doing more to cheapen the necessaries of life.(1247) Although our information as to municipal expenditure on education and medical treatment is scanty, it is pretty clear that the community was, in the Antonine age, beginning to recognise a duty in making provision for both. Vespasian first gave a public endowment to professors of rhetoric in the capital.(1248) The case of Como, described in Pliny’s Letters, was probably not an isolated one. Finding that the youth of that town were compelled to resort to Milan for higher instruction, Pliny, as we have seen, proposed to the parents to establish by general subscription a public school, and he offered himself to contribute one-third of the sum required for the foundation, the rest to be provided by the townsfolk, who were to have the management and selection of teachers in their hands.(1249) The Greek cities had public physicians 500 years before Christ,(1250) and Marseilles and some of the Gallic towns in Strabo’s day employed both teachers and doctors at the public expense.(1251) The regular organisation of public medical attendance in the provinces dates from Antoninus Pius, who required the towns of Asia to have a certain number of physicians among their salaried officers.(1252) The title Archiater, which in the Theodosian Code designates an official class in the provinces as well as at Rome, is found in inscriptions of Beneventum and Pisaurum belonging to an earlier date.(1253) But these departments of municipal expenditure were hardly yet fully organised in the age of the Antonines, and were probably not burdensome. The great field of expenditure lay in the basilicas, temples, amphitheatres, baths, and pavements, whose vanishing remains give us a glimpse of one of the most brilliant ages in history.

The municipal towns relied largely on the voluntary munificence of their wealthy members for great works of public utility or splendour. But we have many records of such enterprises carried out at the common expense, and the name of a special magistracy (curator operum publicorum) to superintend them meets us often in the inscriptions.(1254) These undertakings were frequently on a great scale. The famous bridge of Alcantara was erected in the reign of Trajan by the combined efforts of eleven municipalities in Portugal.(1255) In Bithynia the finances of some of the great towns had been so seriously disorganised by expensive and ill-managed undertakings that the younger Pliny was in the year 111 A.D. sent as imperial legate by Trajan to repair the misgovernment of the province.(1256) Pliny’s correspondence throws a flood of light on many points of municipal administration, and foreshadows its coming decay. The cities appear to have ample funds, but they are grossly mismanaged. There is plenty of public money seeking investment, but borrowers cannot be found at the current rate of 12 per cent. Pliny would have been inclined to compel the decurions to become debtors of the state, but Trajan orders the rate of interest to be put low enough to attract voluntary borrowers.(1257) Apamea, although it had the ancient privilege of managing its own affairs, requested Pliny to examine the public accounts.(1258) He did the same for Prusa, and found many signs of loose and reckless finance, and probable malversation.(1259) Nicaea had spent £80,000 on a theatre, which, from some faults either in the materials or the foundation, was settling, with great fissures in the walls.(1260) The city had also expended a large sum in rebuilding its gymnasium on a sumptuous scale, but the fabric had been condemned by a new architect for radical defects of structure. Nicomedia has squandered £40,000 on two aqueducts which have either fallen or been abandoned.(1261) In authorising the construction of a third the emperor might well emphatically order the responsibility for such blunders to be fastened on the proper persons.(1262) In the same city, when a fire of a most devastating kind had recently occurred, there was no engine, not even a bucket ready, and the inhabitants stood idly by as spectators.(1263) Pliny was most assiduous in devising or promoting engineering improvements for the health and convenience of the province, and often called for expert assistance from Rome. Irregularities in the working of the civic constitutions also gave him much trouble. The ecdicus or defensor has demanded repayment of a largess made to one Julius Piso from the treasury of Amisus, which the decrees of Trajan now forbade.(1264) Just as Pliny had suggested that members of a curia should be forced to accept loans from the State, so we can see ominous signs of a wish to compel men to accept the curial dignity beyond the legal number, in order to secure the honorarium of from £35 to £70 on their admission.(1265) The Lex Pompeia, which forbade a Bithynian municipality to admit to citizenship men from other Bithynian states, had long been ignored, and in numbers of cities there were many sitting in the senate in violation of the law. The Pompeian law also required that a man should be thirty years of age when he was elected to a magistracy or took his place in the Curia, but a law of Augustus had reduced the limit for the minor magistracies to twenty-two. Here was a chance of adding to the strength of the Curia which was seized by the municipal censors. And if a minor magistrate might enter the Curia as a matter of course at twenty-two, why not others equally fit?(1266) In another typical case the legate was disturbed by the lavish hospitality of leading citizens. On the assumption of the toga, at a wedding, or an election to civic office, or the dedication of a public work, not only the whole of the Curia, but a large number of the common people, were often invited to a banquet and received from their host one or two denarii apiece.(1267) Pliny was probably unnecessarily alarmed. The inscriptions show us the same scenes all over the Empire,(1268) and the emperor with calm dignity leaves the question of such entertainments to the prudence of his lieutenant.

There are many religious questions submitted to the emperor in these celebrated despatches, especially those relating to the toleration of Christians.(1269) But, however profoundly interesting, they lie beyond the scope of this chapter. We are occupied with the secular life of the provincial town. And the Letters of Pliny place some things in a clear light. In the first place, the state has begun in the reign of Trajan to control the municipality, especially in the management of its finances; but the control is rather invited than imposed. At any rate, it has become necessary, owing to malversation or incompetence.(1270) Nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the civic bungling exposed by Pliny, and the clear, patient wisdom of the distant emperor. And in another point we can see that the municipalities have entered on that disastrous decline which was to end in the ruin of the fifth century. Wasteful finance is already making its pressure felt on the members of the Curia, and membership is beginning to be thought a burden rather than an honour. From the reign of Trajan we begin to hear of the Curatores, who were imperial officers, appointed at first to meet a special emergency, but who became permanent magistrates, with immense powers, especially over finance.(1271) The free civic life of the first century is being quietly drawn under the fatal spell of a bureaucratic despotism.

The cities did much for themselves out of the public revenues.(1272) But there are many signs that private ambition or munificence did even more. The stone records of Pompeii confirm these indications in a remarkable way. Pompeii, in spite of the prominence given to it by its tragic fate, was only a third-rate town, with a population probably of not more than 20,000.(1273) Its remains, indeed, leave the impression that a considerable class were in easy circumstances; but it may be doubted whether Pompeii could boast of any great capitalists among its citizens. Its harbour, at the mouth of the Sarno, was the outlet for the trade of Nola and Nuceria. There were salt works in a suburb near the sea. The fish sauces of Umbricius Scaurus had a great celebrity.(1274) The vine and the olive were cultivated on the volcanic offshoot from Vesuvius; but the wine of Pompeii was said by the elder Pliny to leave a lingering headache. Mill-stones were made from the lava of the volcano. The market gardeners drove a flourishing trade, and the cabbage of Pompeii was celebrated. On the high ground towards Vesuvius many wealthy Romans, Cicero, and Drusus, the son of Claudius, built country seats, in that delicious climate where the winters are so short, and the summer heats are tempered by unfailing breezes from the mountains or the western sea. All these things made Pompeii a thriving and attractive place; yet its trade hardly offered the chance of the huge fortunes which could be accumulated in those days at Puteoli or Ostia.(1275)

Nevertheless, a large number of the public buildings of Pompeii were the gift of private citizens. The Holconii were a great family of the place in the reign of Augustus. M. Holconius Rufus had been ordinary duumvir five times, and twice quinquennial duumvir; he was priest of Augustus, and finally was elected patron of the town.(1276) Such dignities in those days imposed a corresponding burden. And an inscription tells that, on the rebuilding of the great theatre, probably about 3 B.C., Holconius Rufus and Holconius Celer defrayed the expense of the crypt, the tribunals, and the whole space for the spectators. Women did not fall behind men in their public benefactions. On the eastern side of the forum of Pompeii there is a building and enclosure, with the remains of porticoes, colonnades, and fountains, which are supposed to have been a cloth market. In a niche stood a marble statue, dedicated by the fullers of Pompeii to Eumachia, a priestess of the city. And Eumachia herself has left a record that she and her son had erected the building at their own expense.(1277) The dedication probably belongs to the reign of Tiberius. The visitor who leaves the forum by the arch, at the north-east corner, and turns into the broadest thoroughfare of the town, soon reaches the small temple of Fortuna Augusta, erected in the reign of Augustus. Both the site and the building were the gift of one M. Tullius, who had, like M. Holconius, borne all the honours which the city could bestow.(1278) The amphitheatre in the south-east corner of the town, the scene of so many gladiatorial combats recorded in the inscriptions, was erected by two men of the highest official rank, C. Quinctius Valgus and M. Porcius, probably the same men who bore at least part of the cost of the smaller theatre of Pompeii.(1279) The last instance of this generous public spirit which we shall mention is of interest in many ways. It is well known that in the year 63 A.D. an earthquake overthrew many buildings, and wrought great havoc in Pompeii. Among other edifices, the temple of Isis was thrown down. The temple, of which we can now study the remains, had been built by a boy of six years of age, Numerius Popidius Celsinus, who, in acknowledgment of his own, or rather of his father’s liberality, was at that unripe age co-opted a member of “the splendid order.”(1280) This mode of rewarding a father by advancing his infant son to premature honours is not unknown in other inscriptions.(1281)

The literature of the age contains many records of profuse private liberality of the same kind. The circle and family of Pliny were, as we have seen in this, as in other respects, models of the best sentiment of the time. Pliny was not a very rich man, according to the standard of an age of colossal fortunes; yet his benefactions, both to private friends and to the communities in which he was interested, were on the scale of the largest wealth. It has been calculated that he must have altogether given to his early home and fatherland, as he calls it, a sum of more than £80,000; and the gifts were of a thoroughly practical kind—a library, a school endowment, a foundation for the nurture of poor children, a temple of Ceres, with spacious colonnades to shelter the traders who came for the great fair.(1282) A great lady, Ummidia Quadratilla, known to us not altogether favourably in Pliny’s letters, built a temple and amphitheatre for Casinum.(1283) From the elder Pliny we learn that the distinguished court physicians, the two Stertinii, whose professional income is said to have ranged from £2000 to £5000 a year, exhausted their ample fortune in their benefactions to the city of Naples.(1284) A private citizen bore the cost of an aqueduct for Bordeaux, at an expenditure of £160,000.(1285) Another benefactor, one Crinas, spent perhaps £80,000 on the walls of Marseilles.(1286) The grandfather of Dion Chrysostom devoted his entire ancestral fortune to public objects.(1287) Dion, himself, according to his means, followed the example of his ancestor. The site alone of a colonnade, with shops and booths, which he presented to Prusa, cost about £1800. When Cremona was destroyed by the troops of Vespasian in A.D. 69, its temples and forums were restored by the generous zeal of private citizens, after all the horror and exhaustion of that awful conflict.(1288)

But the prince of public benefactors in the Antonine age was the great sophist Herodes Atticus, the tutor of M. Aurelius, who died in the same year as his pupil, 180 A.D. He acted up to his theory of the uses of wealth on a scale of unexampled munificence.(1289) His family was of high rank, and claimed descent from the Aeacidae of Aegina. They had also apparently inexhaustible resources. His father spent a sum of nearly £40,000 in supplementing an imperial grant for the supply of water to the Troad. The munificence of the son was extended to cities in Italy, as well as to Corinth, Thessaly, Euboea, Boeotia, Elis, and pre-eminently to Athens. He gave an aqueduct to Canusium and Olympia, a racecourse to Delphi, a roofed theatre to Corinth.(1290) He provided sulphur baths at Thermopylae for the visitors from Thessaly and the shores of the Maliac gulf. He aided in the restoration of Oricum in Epirus, and liberally recruited the resources of many another decaying town in Greece. He was certainly benevolent, but he had also a passion for splendid fame, and cherished an ambition to realise the dream of Nero, by cutting a canal across the Corinthian Isthmus.(1291) But Attica, where he was born, and where he had a princely house on the Ilissus, was the supreme object of his bounty. In his will he left each Athenian citizen an annual gift of a mina. He would offer to the Virgin Goddess a sacrifice of a hundred oxen on a single day; and, when the great festivals came round, he used to feast the people by their tribes, as well as the resident strangers, on couches in the Ceramicus. He restored the ancient shrines and stadia with costly marbles. And, in memory of Rhegilla, his wife, he built at the foot of the acropolis a theatre for 6000 spectators, roofed in with cedar wood, which, to the eye of Pausanias, surpassed all similar structures in its splendour.(1292)

The liberality of Herodes Atticus, however astonishing it may seem, was only exceptional in its scale. The same spirit prevailed among the leading citizens or the great patroni of hundreds of communities, many of them only known to us from a brief inscription or two; and we have great reason to be grateful on this score to the imperial legislation of later days, which did its best to preserve these stone records for the eyes of posterity.(1293) But in forming an estimate of the splendid public spirit evoked by municipal life, it is well to remind ourselves that much has necessarily been lost in the wreck of time, and also that what we have left represents the civic life of a comparatively brief period. Yet the remains are so numerous that it is almost impossible to give any adequate idea of their profusion to those who are unacquainted with the inscriptions. The objects of this liberality are as various as the needs of the community—temples, theatres, bridges, markets, a portico or a colonnade, the relaying of a road or pavement from the forum to the port, the repair of an aqueduct, above all the erection of new baths or the restoration of old ones, with perhaps a permanent foundation to provide for the free enjoyment of this greatest luxury of the south. The boon was extended to all citizens of both sexes, and in some cases, even to strangers and to slaves.(1294) There is an almost monotonous sameness in the stiff, conventional record of this vast mass of lavish generosity. It all seems a spontaneous growth of the social system. One monument is erected by the senate and people of Tibur to a man who had borne all its honours, and had left the town his sole heir.(1295) On another, an Augustal of Cales, who had received the insignia of the duumvirate, tells posterity that he had laid down a broad road through the town.(1296) Another benefactor bore the chief cost of a new meat market at Aesernia, the authorities of the town supplying the pillars and the tiles.(1297) A priestess of Calama in Numidia expended a sum of £3400 on a new theatre.(1298) Perhaps the commonest object of private liberality was the erection or maintenance of public baths. An old officer of the fourth legion provided free bathing at Suessa Senonum for every one, even down to the slave girls.(1299) At Bononia, a sum of £4350 was bequeathed for the same liberal purpose.(1300) A magnate of Misenum bequeathed 400 loads of hard wood annually for the furnaces of the baths, but with the stipulation that his son should be made patron of the town, and that his successors should receive all the magistracies.(1301)

These are only a few specimens taken at random from the countless records of similar liberality to the parent city. The example of the emperors must have stimulated the creation of splendid public works in the provinces. It has been remarked by M. Boissier that the imperial government at all times displayed the politic or instinctive love of monarchy for splendour and magnificence.(1302) The Roman Code, down to the end of the Western Empire, gives evidence of a jealous care for the preservation of the monuments and historic buildings of the past, and denounces with very unconventional energy the “foul and shameful” traffic in the relics of ancient glory which prevailed in the last age of the Empire.(1303) After great fires and desolating wars, the first thought of the most frugal or the most lavish prince was to restore in greater grandeur what had been destroyed. After the great conflagration of A.D. 64, which laid in ashes ten out of the fourteen regions of Rome, Nero immediately set to work to rebuild the city in a more orderly fashion, with broader streets and open spaces.(1304) Vespasian, on his accession, found the treasury loaded with a debt of £320,000,000. Yet the frugal emperor did not hesitate to begin at once the restoration of the Capitol, and all the other ruins left by the great struggle of A.D. 69 from which his dynasty arose.(1305) He even undertook some new works on a great scale, the temple of Peace and the amphitheatre, on the plans projected by Augustus. Titus completed the Colosseum, and erected the famous baths.(1306) Domitian once more restored the Capitol, and added many new buildings, temples to his “divine” father and brother, with many shrines of his special patroness Minerva; a stone stadium for 30,000 people, and an Odeum for an audience of 10,000.(1307) Trajan was lauded by Pliny for his frugal administration of the treasury, combined with magnificence in his public works.(1308) Nor was the encomium undeserved. He made docks and erected warehouses at Ostia; he ran a new road through the Pomptine marshes; he lavished money on aqueducts and baths.(1309) His most imposing construction was a new forum between the Capitoline and the Quirinal, with stately memorials of the achievements of his reign. But the prince of imperial builders and engineers was Hadrian. Wherever he went he took with him in his journeys a troop of architects to add something to the splendour or convenience of the cities through which he passed. “In almost every city,” says his biographer, “he erected some building.”(1310) But the capital was not neglected by Hadrian. He restored historic structures such as the Pantheon and the temple of Neptune, the forum of Augustus, and Agrippa’s baths, with no ostentatious intrusion of his own name.(1311) In his own name he built the temples of Venus and Roma, the bridge across the Tiber, and that stately mausoleum, which, as the castle of S. Angelo, links the memory of the pagan Empire with the mediaeval Papacy and the modern world. The example of the imperial masters of the world undoubtedly reinforced the various impulses which inspired the dedication of so much wealth to the public service or enjoyment through all the cities of the Empire.

But the wealthy and public-spirited citizen was also expected to cater for the immediate pleasure or amusement of his neighbours in games and feasts. We have seen that Pliny, during his administration of Bithynia, seems to have regarded the public feasts given to a whole commune on occasions of private rejoicing, as dangerous to the general tranquillity. Yet the usage meets us everywhere in the inscriptions, and even in the literary history of the time. This spacious hospitality was long demanded from the rich and powerful, from the general at his triumph, from the great noble on his birthday or his daughter’s marriage, from the rich burgher at the dedication of a temple or a forum which he had given to the city, from the man who had been chosen patron of a town in expectation of such largesses, not to speak of the many private patrons whose morning receptions were thronged by a hungry crowd, eager for an invitation to dinner, or its equivalent in the sportula.(1312) Julius Caesar on his triumph in 46 B.C. had feasted the people at 22,000 tables.(1313) Great houses, like the sumptuous seat of Caninius Rufus at Como, had enormous banquet halls for such popular repasts.(1314) The Trimalchio of Petronius desires himself to be sculptured on his tomb in the character of such a lavish host.(1315) There was in that age no more popular and effective way of testifying gratitude for the honours bestowed by the popular voice, or of winning them, than by a great feast to the whole commune, generally accompanied by a distribution of money, according to social or official grade. It was also the most popular means of prolonging one’s memory to bequeath a foundation for the perpetual maintenance of such repasts in honour of the dead.(1316) One P. Lucilius of Ostia had held all the great offices of his town, and had rewarded his admirers with a munificence apparently more than equivalent to the official honours they had bestowed. He had paved a long road from the forum to the arch, restored a temple of Vulcan, of which he was the curator, and the temples of Venus, Spes, and Fortuna; he had provided standard weights for the meat market, and a tribunal of marble for the forum. But probably his most popular benefaction was a great banquet to the citizens, where 217 couches were arrayed for them.(1317) The same munificent person had twice entertained the whole of the citizens at luncheon. Elsewhere a veteran, with a long and varied service, had settled at Auximum where he had been elected patron of the community. His old comrades, the centurions of the Second Legion (Traj. Fortis) erected a monument to his virtues, and, at the dedication, he gave a banquet to the townsfolk.(1318) One other example, out of the many which crowd the inscriptions, may serve to complete the picture of civic hospitality. Lucius Cornelius of Surrentum received on his death the honour of a public funeral by a vote of the Curia. The inscription on his statue records that, on assuming the garb of manhood, he had provided a meal of pastry and mead for the populace; when he became aedile, he exhibited a contest of gladiators; and, twice reaching the honours of the duumvirate, he repaid the compliment by splendid games and a stately banquet.(1319)

At these entertainments a gift of money, always graduated according to the social rank of the guests, decurio, augustal, or plebeian, was generally added to the fare.(1320) Sometimes the distribution took the form of a lottery. A high official of Beneventum, who had probably inherited a fortune from his father, a leading physician of the capital, once scattered tickets among the crowd, which gave the finder the right to a present of gold, silver, dress, or other smaller prizes.(1321) Women appeared sometimes both as hostesses and guests on these occasions. Caesia Sabina of Veii, on the day on which her husband was entertaining all the citizens, invited the female relatives of the decurions to dinner, with the additional luxury of a gratuitous bath.(1322) It is curious to observe that at the festivities in which women are entertained, the sharp demarcation of ranks is maintained as strictly as it is among their male relations. Thus, in a distribution at Volceii, the decurions, augustales, and vicani, receive respectively thirty, twenty, and twelve sesterces apiece; while the proportion observed among the ladies of the three social grades is sixteen, eight, and four. Nor were children, even those of the slave class, forgotten on these festive occasions. One kindly magnate of Ferentinum left a fund of about £750 to give an annual feast of pastry and mead upon his birthday for all the inhabitants with their wives, and at the same time, 300 pecks of nuts were provided for the children, bond and free.(1323)

These provincial societies, as we have already seen, were organised on aristocratic or plutocratic principles. The distinction between honestior and humilior, which becomes so cruel in the Theodosian Code, was, even in the Antonine age, more sharply drawn and more enduring than is agreeable to our modern notions of social justice. The rich have a monopoly of all official power and social precedence; they have even the largest share in gifts and paltry distributions of money which wealth might be expected to resign and to despise. Their sons have secured to them by social convention, or by popular gratitude and expectancy, a position equal to that of their ancestors. The dim plebeian crowd, save for the right of an annual vote at the elections, which was in a few generations to be withdrawn, seem to be of little more consequence than the slaves; they were of far less consequence than those freedmen who had the luck or the dexterity to build up a rapid fortune, and force their way into the chasm between the privileged and the disinherited. Yet this would hardly be a complete and penetrating view of the inner working and the spirit of that municipal society. The apparent rigidity and harshness of the lines of demarcation were often relieved by a social sentiment which, on the one hand, made heavy demands on rank and wealth, and on the other, drew all classes together by the strong bond of fellowship in a common social life. There has probably seldom been a time when wealth was more generally regarded as a trust, a possession in which the community at large has a right to share. There never was an age in which the wealthy more frankly, and even recklessly, recognised this imperious claim. It would indeed be difficult to resolve into its elements the complicated mass of motives which impelled the rich burgher to undertake such enormous, and often ruinous, expenditure for the common good or pleasure. There was of course much of mere selfish ambition and love of popularity. The passion for prominence was probably never stronger. Direct or even veiled corruption of the electors was, indeed, strictly prohibited by law.(1324) But it was a recognised principle of public life that the city should honour its benefactors, and that those whom she had raised to her highest distinctions should manifest their gratitude by some contribution to the comfort or the enjoyments of the people. But, when we have admitted all vulgar motives of munificence, a man would show himself a very unobservant, or else a very cynical student of the time, if he failed to recognise that, among these countless benefactors, there were many animated, not only by a sense of duty, but by a real ardour of public spirit, men who wished to live in the love and memory of their fellows, and who had a rare perception of the duties of wealth. Philostratus has left us in his own words a record of the principles which inspired Herodes Atticus in his almost fabulous donations to many cities in Asia, Greece, and Italy. Herodes used to say that the true use of money was to succour the needs of others; riches which were guarded with a niggard hand were only a “dead wealth”; the coffers in which they were stowed away were merely a prison; and the worship of money resembled the sacrifice which the fabled Aloidae offered to a god after putting him in chains.(1325) The main characteristics of human nature are singularly fixed from age to age, although the objects of its love and devotion may endlessly vary. The higher unselfish impulses must assert themselves in any society which is not plunging into the abyss. The choicer spirits will be always ready to lavish effort or material wealth on objects which are sacred to their own age, although they may seen chimerical or unworthy to the next. And we may well believe that the man who in the second century built a bath or a theatre for fellow townsmen, might possibly, had he lived in the fifth, have dedicated a church to a patron saint, or bequeathed his lands to a monastery.

The Antonine age was on one side perhaps rather coarse in its ideals, passionately fond of splendour and brilliant display, proud of civic dignity, and keenly alive to the ease and comfort and brightness which common effort or individual generosity might add to the enjoyment of life. It was also an intensely sociable age. Men looked for their happiness to their city rather than to the family or the state. If their city could not play a great part as an independent commonwealth, it might, by the self-sacrifice of its sons, assert its dignity among its rivals. It could make itself a society which men would proudly or affectionately claim as their “patria” and their parent, and on which they would vie with one another in lavishing their time and their gold. And the buildings and banquets and bright festivals, on which so much was lavished, were enjoyed by all citizens alike, the lowest and the highest, although high and low had sometimes by prescriptive usage an unequal share in the largesses. The free enjoyment of sumptuous baths, of good water from the Atlas, the Apennines, or the Alban Hills, the right to sit at ease with one’s fellows when the Pseudolus or the Adelphi was put upon the boards, the pleasure of strolling in the shady colonnades of the forum or the market, surrounded by brilliant marbles and frescoes, with fountains shedding their coolness around; the good fellowship which, for the time, levelled all ranks, in many a simple communal feast, with a coin or two distributed at the end to recall or heighten the pleasure—all these things tended to make the city a true home, to some extent almost a great family circle. There was much selfishness and grossness, no doubt, in all this civic life. Which later age can cast the first stone? Yet a study of the inscriptions of the Antonine age leaves the impression that, amid all the sharply drawn distinctions of rank, with all the petty ambition and self-assertion, or the fawning and expectant servility, there was also a genuine patriotic benevolence on the one hand, and a grateful recognition of it on the other. The citizens record on many a tablet their gratitude to patron or duumvir or augustal, or to some simple old centurion, returned from far frontier camps, who had paved their promenade, or restored their baths, or given them a shrine of Neptune or Silvanus. They also preserved the memory of many a kindly benefactor who left, as he fondly thought for ever, the funds for an annual feast, with all the graduated shares scrupulously prescribed, to save an obscure tomb from the general oblivion. Thus, although that ancient city life had its sordid side, which is laid bare with such pitiless Rabelaisian realism by Petronius, it had its nobler aspect also. Notwithstanding the aristocratic tone of municipal society in the age of the Antonines, it is possible that the separation of classes in our great centres of population is morally more sharp and decided than it was in the days when the gulf between social ranks was in theory impassable.

There is however another side to this picture of fraternal civic life. If some of its pleasures were innocent and even softening and elevating, there were others which pandered to the most brutal and cruel passions. The love of amusement grew upon the Roman character as civilisation developed in organisation and splendour, and unfortunately the favourite amusements were often obscene and cruel. The calendar of the time is sufficiently ominous. The number of days which were annually given up to games and spectacles at Rome rose from 66 in the reign of Augustus, to 135 in the reign of M. Aurelius, and to 175, or more, in the fourth century. In this reckoning no account is taken of extraordinary festivals on special occasions.(1326) The Flavian amphitheatre was inaugurated by Titus with lavish exhibitions extending over 100 days.(1327) The Dacian triumphs of Trajan were celebrated by similar rejoicings for 123 days, and 10,000 gladiators were sent down into the arena.(1328) The rage of all classes of the Roman populace for these sights of suffering and shame continued unabated to the very end of the Western Empire. The lubricity of pantomime and the slaughter of the arena were never more fiercely and keenly enjoyed than when the Germans were thundering at the gates of Trèves and Carthage.(1329)

It is difficult for us now to understand this lust of cruelty among a people otherwise highly civilised, a passion which was felt not merely by the base rabble, but even by the cultivated and humane.(1330) There was undoubtedly at all times a coarse insensibility to suffering in the Roman character. The institution of slavery, which involves the denial of ordinary human rights to masses of fellow-creatures, had its usual effect in rendering men contemptuously callous to the fate of all who did not belong to the privileged class. Even a man of high moral tone like Tacitus, while he condemns Drusus for gloating over his gladiatorial shows, has only a word of scorn for the victims of the butchery.(1331) And the appetite grew with what it fed on. From father to son, for nearly seven centuries, the Roman character became more and more indurated under the influence of licensed cruelty. The spectacle was also surrounded by the emperors, even the greatest and best, for politic reasons, with ever growing splendour. The Flavian amphitheatre, which remains as a monument of the glory of the Empire and of its shame, must have been a powerful corruptor. There, tier above tier, was gathered the concentrated excitability and contagious enthusiasm of 87,000 spectators. The imperial circle and the emperor himself, members of high senatorial houses, the great officers of state, the priests, the vestal virgins, gave an impressive national dignity to the inhuman spectacle. And now and then an Eastern prince or ambassador, or the chief of some half-savage tribe in Germany or Numidia,(1332) amused the eyes of the rabble who swarmed on the upper benches. Every device of luxurious art was employed to heighten the baser attractions of the scene. The magnificent pile was brightened with gems of artistic skill.(1333) The arena was tesselated with rich colouring from the sunlight which streamed through the awnings. The waters of perfumed fountains shot high into the air, spreading their fragrant coolness; and music filled the pauses in the ghastly conflict. From scenes like these was probably drawn the picture in the Apocalypse: Mulier circumdata purpura et coccino—mater fornicationum—ebria de sanguine sanctorum.

In the first and second centuries the passion for cruel excitement was as strong in the provincial towns as it was even at Rome. This may have been partly due to the monotony of provincial life. It was also stimulated by the ease with which public sentiment extorted the means for these gratifications from the richer citizens. The opinion of the powerful and enlightened class, with rare exceptions, made no effort to purify and humanise the grossness of the masses. Seneca and Demonax indeed display a modern humanity in their view of the degrading influence of these displays.(1334) A humane magistrate of Vienne, one Trebonius Rufinus, in the reign of Trajan, having autocratically abolished them in his city, was called upon to defend his conduct before the emperor, and Junius Mauricus had the courage to express before the council a wish that they could be abolished also at Rome.(1335) Augustus had, by an imperial edict, restrained the cruel exhibitions of the father of Nero.(1336) Vespasian, according to Dion Cassius,(1337) had little pleasure in the shows of the arena. But the emperors generally, and not least Vespasian’s sons, encouraged and pandered to the lust for blood.(1338) The imperial gladiators were organised elaborately in four great schools by Domitian,(1339) with a regular administration, presided over by officers of high rank. The gentle Pliny, who had personally no liking for such spectacles, applauded his friend Maximus for giving a gladiatorial show to the people of Verona, to do honour to his dead wife, in the true spirit of the old Bruti and Lepidi of the age of the Punic Wars.(1340) He found in the shows of Trajan a splendid incentive of contempt for death.

It is little wonder that, with such examples and such approval, the masses gloated unrestrained over these inhuman sports. The rag-dealer at Trimalchio’s dinner is certainly drawn to the life.(1341) They are going to have a three days’ carnival of blood. There is to be no escape; the butcher is to do his work thoroughly in full view of the crowded tiers of the amphitheatre. It was in Etruria, and in Campania, where Trimalchio had his home, that the gladiatorial combats took their rise. Campanian hosts used to entertain their guests at dinner with them in the days before the second Punic War.(1342) And it was in Campanian towns that in the first century was displayed most glaringly the not unusual combination of cruelty and voluptuousness. The remains of Pompeii furnish us with the most vivid and authentic materials for a study of the sporting tastes of a provincial town. It is significant that the amphitheatre of Pompeii, which was capable of holding 20,000 people, was built fifty years before the first stone amphitheatre erected by Statilius Taurus at Rome.(1343) It is also remarkable that, although Pompeii is mentioned only twice by Tacitus, one of the references is to a bloody riot arising out of the games of the amphitheatre.(1344) In the year 59 A.D. a Roman senator in disgrace, named Livineius Regulus, gave a great gladiatorial show at Pompeii, which attracted many spectators from the neighbouring town of Nuceria. The scenes of the arena were soon reproduced in a fierce street fight between the people of the two towns, in which many Nucerians were left dead or wounded. The catastrophe was brought before the emperor, and referred by him to the Senate, with the result that Pompeii was sternly deprived of its favourite amusement for a period of ten years. But when the interdict was removed, the Pompeians had the enjoyment of their accustomed pleasure for ten years more, till it was finally interrupted by the ashes of Vesuvius.

A building at Pompeii, which was originally a colonnade connected with the theatre,(1345) had been converted into barracks for a school of gladiators in the time of the early Empire.(1346) Behind the colonnade of more than seventy Doric columns had been built a long row of small cells, with no opening except on the central enclosure. There was a mess room, and the exedra on the southern side served as a retiring room for the trainers and the men in the intervals of exercise. The open area was used for practice. These buildings have yielded many specimens of gladiators’ arms, helmets, and greaves richly embossed in relief, scores of mail-coats, shields, and horse-trappings. In one room there were found the stocks, and four skeletons with irons on their legs. In another, eighteen persons had taken refuge in the last catastrophe, and, among them, a woman wearing costly jewels. The walls and columns were covered with inscriptions and rude sketches of gladiatorial life. Indeed the graffiti relating to it are perhaps the most interesting in Pompeii. On some of the tombs outside the city we can still read the notices of coming games, painted on the walls by a professional advertiser, one Aemilius Celer, “by the light of the moon.”(1347) They announce that a duumvir or aedile or flamen will exhibit twenty or thirty pairs of combatants on the calends of May or the ides of April. There will also be a hunt, athletic games, a distribution of gifts, and awnings will be provided. Programmes were for sale in advance, with a list of the events. The contents of one can still be read scratched on a wall, with marginal notes of the results of the competition. In one conflict, Pugnax, in the Thracian arms, had beaten Murranus the Myrmillo, fighting in the arms of Gaul, with the fish upon his helmet; and the fate of Murranus is chronicled in one tragic letter p. (periit). Two others fought in chariots in old British fashion. And the Publius Ostorius who won was, as his name may suggest, a freedman, now fighting as a voluntary combatant, according to the inscription, in his fifty-first conflict.(1348) The tomb of Umbricius Scaurus, on the highway outside the Herculaneum gate, was adorned in stucco relief with animated scenes from the arena of hunting and battle. Hunters with sword and cloak, like a modern toréador, are engaging lions or tigers. Two gladiators are charging one another on horseback. Here, a vanquished combatant, with upturned hand, is imploring the pity of the spectators, while another is sinking in the agony of death upon the sand. The name, the school, and the fighting history of each combatant are painted beside the figure.(1349) The universal enthusiasm for the shows is expressed in many a rude sketch which has been traced by boyish hands upon the walls. The record of the heroes of the arena was evidently then as familiar as that of a champion footballer or cricketer is now to our own sporting youth. In the peristyle of a house in Nola Street, the names of some thirty gladiators can be read, with the character of their arms and the number of their conflicts. Portraits of gladiators are figured on lamps and rings and vases of the period. The charm of their manly strength, according to Juvenal, was fatal to the peace of many a Roman matron of the great world. And the humbler girls of Pompeii have left the memorial of their weakness in more than one frank outburst of rather unmaidenly admiration.(1350)

It is a grave deduction from the admiring judgment of the glory of the Antonine age, that its most splendid remains are the stately buildings within whose enclosure, for centuries, the populace were regaled with the sufferings and the blood of the noblest creatures of the wild animal world and of gallant men. The deserts and forests of Africa and the remotest East contributed their elephants and panthers and lions to these scenes. And every province of the Empire sent its contingent of recruits for the arena, Gaul, Germany, and Thrace, Britain and Dacia, the villages of the Atlas, and the deserts of the Soudan.(1351) Just in proportion to the depth of the impress made by Roman civilisation, was the amphitheatre more or less popular in the provinces. In Italy itself the passion was naturally strongest. Quiet little places, buried in the Apennines, or in the mountains of Samnium, had their regular spectacles, and record their gratitude for the pleasure to some magistrate or patron.(1352) The little town of Fidenae, in the reign of Tiberius, gained for a moment a sinister fame by the collapse of its amphitheatre, involving the death or mutilation of 50,000 spectators.(1353) An augustal of Praeneste endowed his town with a school of gladiators, and received a statue for this contribution to the pleasures of the populace.(1354) A. Clodius Flaccus of Pompeii, in his first duumvirate, on the Apollinaria, gave an exhibition in the forum of bull-fighting, pugilism, and pantomime. He signalised his second tenure of the office by a show of thirty-five pairs of gladiators, with a hunting scene of bulls, boars, and bears.(1355) At Minturnae, a monument reminds “the excellent citizens” that, in a show lasting for four days, eleven of the foremost of Campanian gladiators had died before their eyes, along with ten ferocious bears.(1356) At Compsa in Samnium, a place hardly ever heard of, the common people erected a statue to a priest of Magna Mater, who had given them a splendid show, and he in turn rewarded their gratitude by a feast to both sexes, which lasted over two days.(1357) Similar records of misplaced munificence might be produced from Bovianum and Beneventum, from Tibur and Perusia, and many another obscure Italian town. But the brutal insensibility of the age is perhaps nowhere so glaringly paraded as in the days following the short-lived victory of the Vitellian arms at Bedriacum. There, on that ghastly plain, on which his rival had been crushed and had closed a tainted life by a not inglorious death, Vitellius gloated over the wreck of the great struggle. The trees were cut down, the crops trampled into mire; the soil was soaked and festering with blood, while mangled forms of men and horses still lay rotting till the vultures should complete their obsequies. Within forty days of the battle, the emperor attended great gladiatorial combats given by his generals at Cremona and Bononia, as if to revive the memory of the carnage by a cruel mimicry.(1358) The grim literary avenger of that carnival of blood has pictured the imperial monster’s end, within a short space, in colours that will never fade, deserted by his meanest servants, shuddering at the ghastly terrors of the vast, silent solitudes of the palace, dragged forth from his hiding, and flung with insults and execrations down the Gemonian Stairs. The dying gladiator of Cremona was more than avenged.(1359)

The western provinces bordering on the Mediterranean, Gaul, Spain, and Africa, drank deepest of the spirit which created the great amphitheatres of Arles, Trèves, and Carthage, Placentia and Verona, of Puteoli, Pompeii, and Capua. But the East caught the infection, and gladiatorial combats were held at Antioch in Pisidia, at Nysa in Caria, and at Laodicea; Alexandria had its amphitheatre from the days of Augustus, and a school of gladiators, presided over by a high imperial officer.(1360) The Teutonic regions of the north and Greece were almost the only provinces in which the bloody games were not popular. The one Greek town where the taste for them was fully developed was the mongrel city of Corinth, which was a Roman colony. In the novel of Apuleius we meet a high Corinthian magistrate travelling through Thessaly to collect the most famous gladiators for his shows.(1361) Yet even in Greece, even at Athens, which had been the home of kindly pity from the days of Theseus, the cruel passion was spreading in the days of the Antonines. Plutarch urges public men to banish or to restrain these exhibitions in their cities.(1362) When the Athenians, from an ambition to rival the splendour of Corinth, were meditating the establishment of a gladiatorial show, the gentle Demonax bade them first to overturn their altar of Pity.(1363) The apostles of Hellenism, Dion, Plutarch, and Lucian, were unanimous in condemning an institution which sacrificed the bravest men to the brutal passions of the mob.

The games of the arena were sometimes held at the expense of the municipality on great festivals, with a public officer, bearing the title of curator,(1364) to direct them. But, perhaps more frequently, they were given by great magistrates or priests at their own expense; or some rich parvenu, like the cobbler of Bologna or the fuller of Modena, who have been ridiculed by Martial, would try by such a display to force an entrance into the guarded enclosure of Roman rank.(1365) There were also frequent bequests to create a permanent agonistic foundation. The most striking example of such a legacy is to be found on an inscription in honour of a munificent duumvir of Pisaurum. He left a capital sum of more than £10,000 to the community. The interest on two-fifths of this bequest, perhaps amounting to £500, was to be spent in giving a general feast on the birthday of the founder’s son. The accumulated interest of the remaining three-fifths, amounting, perhaps, to £4000, was to be devoted to a quinquennial exhibition of gladiators.(1366) An aedile in Petronius is going to spend between £3000 and £4000 on a three days’ show.(1367) The cost of these exhibitions, however, must have widely varied. We hear of one in the second century B.C. which cost over £7000.(1368) The number of pairs engaged appears from the inscriptions to have ranged from five to thirty. The shows lasted from one to as many as eight days.(1369) And the quality of the combatants was also very various. Tiberius once recalled some finished veterans from their retirement at a fee of about £800 each.(1370) On the other hand, a grumbler at Trimalchio’s dinner sneers at a stingy aedile, whose gladiators were “two-penny men,” whom you might knock over with a breath.(1371) Besides the great imperial schools at Praeneste, Capua, or Alexandria, and the “families” maintained at all times by some of the great nobles, there were vagrant troops, kept up by speculative trainers for hire, such as that gang into which Vitellius sold his troublesome minion Asiaticus.(1372)

The profession of gladiator was long regarded as a tainted one, on which social sentiment and law alike placed their ban. It was a calling which included the vilest or the most unfortunate of mankind. Slaves, captives in war, or criminals condemned for serious offences, recruited its ranks.(1373) The death in the arena was thus often, really, a deferred punishment for crime. But even from the later days of the Republic, men of free birth were sometimes attracted by the false glory or the solid rewards of the profession. Freedmen sometimes fought at the call of their patrons.(1374) And, when Septimius Severus began to recruit the Pretorian guard from the provinces, the youth of Italy, who had long enjoyed the monopoly of that pampered corps, satisfied their combative or predatory instincts by joining the ranks either of the gladiators or of the brigands.(1375) The gladiator had, indeed, to submit to fearful perils and a cruel discipline. His oath bound him to endure unflinchingly scourging, burning, or death.(1376) His barracks were a closely guarded prison, and, although his fare was necessarily good, his training was entirely directed to the production of a fine fighting animal, who would give good sport in the arena. Yet the profession must have had some powerful attractions. Some of the emperors,(1377) Titus and Hadrian, themselves took a pleasure in the gladiatorial exercises. Commodus, as if to confirm the scandal about his parentage, actually descended into the arena,(1378) and imperial example was followed by men of high rank, and even, according to the satirist, by matronly viragoes.(1379) The splendour of the arms, the ostentatious pomp of the scene of combat, the applause of thousands of spectators on the crowded benches, the fascination of danger, all this invested the cruel craft with a false glory.(1380) The mob of all ages are ready to make a hero of the man who can perform rare feats of physical strength or agility. And the skilful gladiator evidently became a hero under the early Empire, like his colleague of the red or green. His professional record was of public interest; the number of his combats and his victories was inscribed upon his tomb.(1381) His name and his features were scratched by boys on the street walls. He attracted the unconcealed, and not always discreet, admiration of women,(1382) and his praise was sung in classic verse, as his pathetic dignity in death has been immortalised in marble. The memories of a nobler life of freedom sometimes drove the slave of the arena to suicide or mutiny.(1383) But he was oftener proud of his skill and courage, and eager to display them. When shows were rare in the reign of Tiberius, a Myrmillo was heard to lament that the years of his glorious prime were running to waste.(1384) Epictetus says that the imperial gladiators were often heard praying for the hour of conflict.(1385)

Great imperial schools were organised on the strictest military principles, and were under the command of a procurator who had often held high office in the provinces or the army.(1386) Each school had attached to it a staff of masseurs, surgeon-dressers, and physicians to attend to the general health of the members. There were various grades according to skill or length of service, and a man might rise in the end to be trainer of a troop. Gladiators, like all other callings in the second century, had their colleges. We have the roll of one of these, in the year 177 A.D., a college of Silvanus.(1387) The members are divided into three decuries, evidently according to professional rank, and their names and arms are also given. Their comrades often erected monuments to them with a list of their achievements. Thus a dear companion-in-arms commemorates a young Secutor at Panormus, who died in his thirtieth year, who had fought in thirty-four combats, and in twenty-one came off victorious.(1388)

Our authorities do not often permit us to follow the gladiator into retirement. The stern discipline of the Ludus no doubt made better men even of those condemned to it for grievous crimes. The inscriptions contain a few brief records of their family life, which seems to have been as natural and affectionate as that of any other class; wives and daughters lamenting good husbands and fathers in the usual phrases, and fathers in turn mourning innocent young lives, cut short by the cruelty of the gods.(1389) Sometimes the veteran gladiator might be tempted to return to the old scenes for a high fee, or he might become a trainer in one of the schools.(1390) His son might rise even to knightly rank;(1391) but the career of ambition was closed to himself by the taint of a profession which the people found indispensable to their pleasures, and which they loaded with contempt.

The inscriptions pay all honour to the voluntary, single-minded generosity with which men bore costly charges, and gave time and effort to the business of the city. But there was a tendency to treat public benefactions as the acknowledgment of a debt, a return for civic honours. We can sometimes even see that the gift was extorted by the urgency of the people, in some cases even by menaces and force.(1392) The cities took advantage of the general passion for place and social precedence, and, often from sordid motives, crowded their curial lists with patroni and persons decorated with other honorary distinctions. On the famous roll of the council of Canusium, out of a total of 164 members, there are 39 patroni of senatorial or knightly rank, and 25 praetextati, mere boys, who were almost certainly of the same aristocratic class, and were probably destined to be future patrons of the town.(1393) In the desire to secure the support of wealth and social prestige, the municipal law as to the age for magisterial office was frequently disregarded, and even mere infants were sometimes raised to the highest civic honours.(1394) The position of patron seems to have been greatly prized, as it was heavily paid for. A great man with a liberal soul might be patron of several towns,(1395) and sometimes women of rank had the honour conferred on them.(1396) The ornamenta or external badges of official rank were frequently bestowed on people who were not eligible by law for the magistracy. A resident alien (incola), or an augustal, might be co-opted into the “splendid order” of the Curia, or he might be allowed to wear its badges, or those of some office which he could not actually hold.(1397) But it is plain that such distinctions had to be purchased or repaid. The city seldom made any other return for generous devotion, unless it were the space for a grave or the pageant of a public funeral. It is true that a generous benefactor or magistrate is frequently honoured with a statue and memorial tablet. Indeed, the honour is so frequently bestowed that it seems to dwindle to an infinitesimal value.(1398) And it is to our eyes still further reduced by the agreeable convention which seems to have made it a matter of good taste that the person so distinguished by his fellow-citizens should bear the expense of the record himself!(1399) Nor did the expectations of the grateful public end even there; for, at the dedication of the monument, it was seemingly imperative to give a feast to the generous community which allowed or required its benefactor to bear the cost of the memorial of his own munificence.(1400) It is only fair, however, to say that this civic meanness was not universal, and that there are records to show that even the poorest class sometimes subscribed among themselves to pay for the honour which they proposed to confer.(1401)

The Antonine age was an age of splendid public spirit and great material achievement. But truth compels us to recognise that even in the age of the Antonines, there were ominous signs of moral and administrative decay. Municipal benefactors were rewarded with local fame and lavish flattery; but the demands of the populace, together with the force of example and emulation, contributed to make the load which the rich had to bear more and more heavy. Many must have ruined themselves in their effort to hold their place, and to satisfy an exacting public sentiment. Men actually went into debt to do so;(1402) and as municipal life became less attractive or more burdensome, the career of imperial office opened out and offered far higher distinction. The reorganisation of the imperial service by Hadrian had immense effects in diverting ambition from old channels. It created a great hierarchy of office, which absorbed the best ability from the provinces. Provincials of means and position were constantly visiting the capital for purposes of private business or pleasure, or to represent their city as envoys to the emperor. They often made powerful friends during their stay, and their sons, if not they themselves, were easily tempted to abandon a municipal career for the prospect of a high place in the imperial army or the civil service.(1403) It is true that the local tie often remained unbroken. The country town, of course, was proud of the distinction to which its sons rose in the great world; and many a one who had gained a knighthood or some military rank, returned to his birthplace in later years, and was enrolled among its patrons. We may be sure that many a successful man, like the Stertinii of Naples, paid “nurture fees” in the most generous way. But already in the reign of Domitian, as we have seen, legal provision had to be made for the contingency of an insufficient number of candidates for the municipal magistracies. Already, in the reign of Trajan, the cities of Bithynia are compelling men to become members of the Curia, and lowering the age of admission to official rank.(1404) Plutarch laments that many provincials are turning their backs on their native cities and suing for lucrative offices at the doors of great Roman patrons.(1405) Apollonius of Tyana was indignant to find citizens of Ionia, at one of their great festivals, masquerading in Roman names.(1406) The illustrious son of Chaeronea, with a wistful backward glance at the freedom and the glories of the Periclean age, frankly recognises that, under the shadow of the Roman power, the civic horizon has drawn in.(1407) It is a very different thing to hold even the highest magistracy at Thebes or Athens from what it was in the great days of Salamis or Leuctra. But Plutarch accepts the Empire as inevitable. He appreciates its blessings as much as Aristides or Dion Chrysostom. He has none of the revolutionary rage which led Apollonius to cast reproaches at Vespasian, or to boast of his complicity in the overthrow of Nero.(1408) He has little sympathy with philosophers like Epictetus, who would sink the interests of everyday politics in the larger life of the universal commonwealth of humanity. The Empire has extinguished much of civic glory and freedom, but let us recognise its compensating blessings of an ordered peace. Spartam nactus es, hanc exorna, might be the motto of Plutarch’s political counsels. He himself, with a range of gifts and culture, which has made his name immortal, did not disdain to hold a humble office in the poor little place which was his home. And he appeals to the example of Epameinondas, who gave dignity to the magistracy which was concerned with the duty of the cleansing of the sewers and streets of Thebes.(1409) He tells his young pupil that, although we have now no wars to wage, no alliances to conclude, we may wage war on some evil custom, revive some charitable institution, repair an aqueduct, or preside at a sacrifice. Yet Plutarch has a keen insight into the municipal vices of his age, the passion for place and office, the hot unscrupulous rivalry which will stoop to any demagogic arts, the venality of the crowd, and the readiness of the rich to pamper them with largesses and shows, the insane passion for pompous decrees of thanks and memorial statues; above all, the eager servility which abandoned even the poor remnant of municipal liberty, and was always inviting the interference of the prince on the most trivial occasions.(1410) Such appeals paralyse civic energy and hasten the inevitable drift of despotism. He exhorts men to strive by every means to raise the tone of their own community, instead of forsaking it in fastidious scorn, or ambition for a more spacious and splendid life.

The growing distaste for municipal honours was to some extent caused by bureaucratic encroachments on the independence of the Curia. As early as the reign of Trajan there are unmistakable signs, as we have seen, of financial mismanagement and decay. The case of Bithynia, in Trajan’s reign, is sometimes treated as an exceptional one. It may be doubted whether it is not a conspicuous example of general disorganisation. The Bithynian towns were probably not alone in their ill-considered expenditure on faultily planned aqueducts and theatres. Apamea was certainly not the only city which called for an imperial auditor of its accounts. Inscriptions of the reign of Trajan show that many towns in Italy, Como, Canusium, Praeneste, Pisa, Bergamum, and Caere, had curators of their administration appointed, some as early as the reigns of Hadrian or Trajan.(1411) These officers, who were always unconnected with the municipality, took over the financial control, which had previously belonged to the duumvirs and quaestors. They were often senators or equites of high rank, and a single curator sometimes had the supervision of several municipalities. The case of Caere is peculiarly instructive and interesting.(1412) There, an imperial freedman, named Vesbinus, proposed to erect at his own cost a club-house (phretrium), for the augustales, and asked the municipal authorities for a site close to the basilica. At a formal meeting of the Curia, the ground was granted to him, subject to the approval of Curiatius Cosanus, the curator, with a vote of thanks for his liberality. A letter to that official was drawn up, stating the whole case, and asking for his sanction. The curator, writing from Ameria, granted it in the most cordial terms. It is noteworthy that at the very time when Caere was consulting its curator about the proposal of Vesbinus,(1413) the Bithynian cities were laying bare their financial and engineering difficulties to Pliny and Trajan. The glory of free civic life is already on the wane. The municipality has invited or submitted to imperial control. The burdens of office have begun to outweigh its glory and distinction. In a generation or two the people will have lost their elective power, and the Curia will appoint the municipal officers from its own ranks. It will end by becoming a mere administrative machine for levying the imperial taxes; men will fly from its crushing obligations to any refuge; and the flight of the curiales will be as momentous as the coming of the Goths.(1414)

The judgment on that externally splendid city life of the Antonine age will be determined by the ideals of the inquirer. There was a genuine love of the common home, a general pride in its splendour and distinction. And the duty, firmly imposed by public sentiment on the well-endowed to contribute out of their abundance to its material comfort and its glory, was freely accepted and lavishly performed. Nor was this expenditure all devoted to mere selfish gratification. The helplessness of orphanhood and age, the penury and monotonous dulness of the lives of great sunken classes, the education of the young, were drawing forth the pity of the charitable. Munificence was often indeed, in obedience to the sentiment of the time, wasted on objects which were unworthy, or even to our minds base and corrupting. Men seemed to think too much of feasting and the cruel amusement of an hour. Yet when a whole commune was regaled at the dedication of a bath or a temple, there was a healthy social sympathy diffused for the moment through all ranks, which softened the hard lines by which that ancient society was parted.

Yet, in looking back, we cannot help feeling that over all this scene of kindliness and generosity and social good-will, there broods a shadow. It is not merely the doom of free civic life, which is so clearly written on the walls of every curial hall of assembly from the days of Trajan, to be fulfilled in the long-drawn tragedy of the fourth and fifth centuries; three hundred years have still to run before the inevitable catastrophe. It is rather the feeling which seems to lurk under many a sentence, half pitiful, half contemptuous, of M. Aurelius, penned, perhaps, as he looked down on some gorgeous show in the amphitheatre, when the Numidian lion was laid low by a deft stroke of the hunting-spear, or a gallant Myrmillo from the Thames or the Danube sank upon the sand in his last conflict.(1415) It is the feeling of Dion, when he watched the Alexandrians palpitating with excitement over a race in the circus, or the cities of Bithynia convulsed by some question of shadowy precedence or the claim to a line of sandhills. It is the swiftly stealing shadow of that mysterious eclipse which was to rest on intellect and literature till the end of the Western Empire. It is the burden of all religious philosophy from Seneca to Epictetus, which was one long warning against the perils of a materialised civilisation. The warning of the pagan preacher was little heeded; the lesson was not learnt in time. Is it possible that a loftier spiritual force may find itself equally helpless to arrest a strangely similar decline?