Rome: An Empire's Story (39 page)

Citizens were generally the most privileged members of the societies in which they lived. A dramatic scene in the Acts of the Apostles describes how Paul, returning to Jerusalem from his mission in Asia, is caught up by an angry mob, attracting the attention of the Roman soldiers. Addressing them in Greek he asks permission to defend himself to his fellow Jews, which he does in the vernacular explaining he is a Jew of Tarsus, educated and raised in Jerusalem, and then describes his conversion. His speech rouses the mob to a frenzy, and he is arrested and dragged off by the soldiers to be flogged. At this point (and only then) he reveals to the centurion that he has in fact Roman citizenship. The centurion is appalled that he had ordered him to be flogged. There is a nice exchange between the centurion, bitter at having paid for his citizenship, and Paul who declares he is a citizen by birth. Was this yet another distinction that mattered? The centurion has Paul released at once, and handed over to the priestly council of the Sanhedrin where Paul deftly stirs up a squabble between two priestly factions, the Sadducees and the Pharisees.
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It does not matter very much how historical these incidents are because even if fictionalized the anecdote reveals interesting assumptions about how identity politics worked in the Roman provinces. Paul is presented as cleverly exploiting his multiple identities; as a Jew, as a Roman citizen, as a citizen of Tarsus, as a Pharisee, and as a resident alien within Jerusalem. His ability to speak more than one language clearly helped too.

It is easy to identify other locations in the empire where these fine distinctions mattered. Frontier societies had their own gradations of status.
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Legionaries were recruited from citizens but auxiliaries from other subject populations, those whom Romans termed
peregrini
, a word that simply meant foreigners. The populations they served among were mostly
peregrini
too, but unlike them the auxiliaries could look forward to citizenship when they were discharged. Hundreds of bronze certificates of these grants to
auxiliary veterans have been recovered by archaeologists: they were obviously displayed rather proudly in the homes of former soldiers. During their twenty to twenty-five years of service, soldiers of all kinds naturally formed relationships with local women: but these were not formally marriages and children born to them would not be citizens. Special dispensations allowed soldiers to make wills, but their wives and children had no automatic rights in respect of them. An auxiliary veteran could make his slave a citizen by freeing him, but any children he had fathered before he was discharged would have to join up themselves if they wanted the same status. Considerations like these mean we can never study ‘Roman societies’ without including many who were not Romans. Yet if we treat all provincials as ‘in some sense’ Romans, we obscure distinctions that mattered enormously at the time.

Docile Bodies

Over time, more and more of Rome’s subjects were successful in obtaining citizenship. I have already suggested that one reason the Roman world did hold together during the third-century crisis was a sense on the part of enough of Rome’s subjects that this was their world. It is also clear that in many ways the lifestyles of provincial populations came to converge, not on a single or uniform imperial culture, but into a world structured by these very Roman differences, differences based on the gradations of education and status and cultural competence that Paul (or rather the author of Luke–Acts and his readers) understood so well. Enfranchisement, loyalty, and acculturation are not the same thing, but they were deeply interconnected.

For most parts of the empire, the best evidence for the emergence of Roman habits and attitudes is provided by material culture. Consider Roman baths. Roman bathhouses are very distinctive structures; architects, archaeologists, and cultural historians have studied examples from all over the empire.
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Greeks too had taken baths: their nakedness had shocked the Elder Cato. But facilities for collective bathing were fairly rudimentary before the last century
BC
. One reason was technological. Few Greek cities had aqueducts before the Principate and hydraulic concrete was only developed in Campania just before the turn of the millennium. (Greeks had had to use hip baths, which were a rather subsidiary part of exercise spaces.) Eventually bath complexes would also exploit new techniques for covering vast enclosed spaces, and would use bricks and tiles to create spaces heated through warmed floors and by circulating air, and in the grandest examples would create glassed solaria. But the spread of bathing was not just a matter of technology. It also stands for the emergence of a new consensus about cleanliness, health, and beauty. Those ideas can be traced in other ways: the spread of toilet sets, mirrors, and cosmetics, the appearance of standardized hairstyles in statuary, and so on; but let us stick with baths for the moment.

Fig. 18.
The Stabian Baths at Pompeii

The rich had been the first to develop bathing into a central part of a civilized lifestyle. Unsurprising the first luxurious bathhouses were created in the Bay of Naples in the last century
BC
, just when so much else of Roman elite culture was being remodelled.
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Yet even before the end of the Republic, bathing culture was becoming popular in other sectors of society. Public bathhouses, which anyone could pay to use, appeared next. The Stabian Baths in Pompeii are one of the earliest known examples. During Augustus’ reign, Agrippa incorporated grand baths into his park on the Field of Mars. Even more spectacular complexes, usually called
thermae
, were
built in Rome by the emperors Titus and Trajan, Caracalla and Diocletian: they included exercise grounds, swimming pools, saunas, and elaborate displays of the kind of sculpture that Pompey had placed in the porticoes of his theatre. Even today the surviving shell of Diocletian’s baths houses a museum and a couple of churches, while the Baths of Caracalla are the venue for open-air operas and concerts. These imperial benefactions to the capital were the grandest example of a style of civic benefaction known from all the greatest cities of the empire.

Greek cities like Ephesus and Sardis have produced monumental evidence for a variation on this theme, bath complexes combined with gymnasia. The gymnasium had in the classical period been the setting for elite education and leisure: exercise and discussion took place here in a more public setting than the symposium. But in the new lands conquered by Alexander, where Greeks were usually a privileged (and sometimes embattled) urban minority, the gymnasium had become central to a certain definition of Hellenic culture. Greek education and Greek identity operated in these societies as a culture of exclusion, more than as the marker for a particular ethnic group. Athleticism was central to this identity. Festivals ‘equal to the Olympics’ were set up by benefactors all over the Greek world, young aristocrats competed in them for prestige rather than cash prizes, professional athletes also emerged, and athleticism became a focus for certain kinds of Greek literature.
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The civic elites of Roman Egypt were even known as the gymnasial classes, so central were these spaces to that kind of elite culture that looked to Greek models which had in fact become widespread only under Rome: they were also, or claimed to be, hereditary and quite separate from the Egyptians among whom they lived. Everywhere gymnasia became a focus for monumental architecture, and the gymnasiarch became an important figure in civic society. Long list of regulations survive from cities all over the Greek world, showing how gymnasia had come to be thought of as key sites where new citizens were produced and trained. Bathing fitted easily into this complex of associations.

But baths were popular everywhere. Soldiers had bathhouses provided for them in the larger camps, which had come in any case to resemble cities: some British examples are equipped with indoor exercise grounds in place of the open
palaestra
common in the Mediterranean. Where hot springs were discovered, medical establishments were set up. Wealthy landowners built small bath suites in their rural homes, although they were probably only in use when the owner was present. Pliny the Younger describes
arriving late at one of his villas and deciding, as an expression of his consideration and lack of pride, to use the baths in the local town rather than have his own fired up. Bathing had by now become incorporated into aristocratic lifestyles, a social activity that divided the day of work from the evening of leisure. Other adopters included sanctuaries and especially healing centres, and medical writers have a great deal to say about the advantages of bathing (only slightly undermined by their lack of understanding of infection). But we are dealing, after all, with ideology. The habits and ideals of cleanliness had become integral to notions of the self and of civilization that the empire propagated. No extant texts declare that dirty bodies are barbarian bodies— although trousers and beards receive some mild abuse—but upwardly mobile provincials could hardly ignore Roman notions of what constituted civilized standards.

A similar story could be told about food. It would include the spread of the elaborate manners that surrounded meals; the popularization of wine-drinking; new styles of cooking, including a preference for bread wheats over other grains; the creation of new dinner services in ceramic and plate; the evidence for imports of newly essential ingredients such as olive oil, pepper, fish-sauce, and Mediterranean fruits; and the centrality of the evening meal in Roman society and in Latin literature.
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The new ways of life, or lifeworlds, that had come to be widely shared across the empire had many other dimensions. There was a new culture of lighting, one made possible by glass windows in the south and in the north by the spread of lamps and the oil used as fuel: the evening became a new space of time available for work or leisure. New kinds of dress were developed, along with new notions of posture and etiquette of gesture. And of course there was the influence of education—never widespread, but no longer restricted to scribes either—and the effects on provincial children of learning Latin and Greek from Cicero and Virgil, Homer and the tragedians, and of learning to speak in public in a particular way. But I will not labour the point. If what we are considering is a change of identity, it is mostly the kind of identity created by routines and training, an embodied sense of self rather than a set of abstract concepts about ‘Romanness’. The relationship between these learned ideals of the good life and political action is complex. But barbarian raiders in the third century had nothing much to offer in replacement of all this, and perhaps were not interested in doing so, while the groups who moved into the empire in the late fourth and fifth centuries were already convinced of the superiority of Roman ways and simply wanted them for
themselves. The transformation of everyday life, in other words, was profound and it had profound effects.

Identities and Empires

Most studies of identity politics in the Roman Empire have concentrated on the largest scale, on identities such as ‘Romans’ and ‘Greeks’, and on conscious statements about their attitudes to each other. Great progress has been made in this area in recent years. The enormous range of Greek responses to empire has been explored in particular detail, through studies of explicit statements in literary texts; through discussion of how the opposition between the two was constructed through discursive and rhetorical practices; and by playing material culture off against literature.
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Roman ideals are also clearer now, especially the extent to which the conscious efforts of generation after generation of cultural leaders were focused not on creating an alternative, parallel high culture to that of Greece, but rather a universalizing civilization (usually called
humanitas
) in which Greek and Roman both had a part.
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Greek and western elites seem now to have a good deal in common; including a shared commitment to rehearsing their differences. Perhaps we should have suspected this, given that many of the Greek writers of the second and third century—including Arrian and Dio—were Roman senators as well as fans of the classical Greek past, while many of their western contemporaries, including Aulus Gellius, Fronto, and the emperors Hadrian and Marcus, were deeply involved in Greek culture and writing. Two educational systems coexisted, and many members of the civic elites were presumably comfortable only in one. Yet most Greeks must have known and used much more Latin than they ever allowed in their classicizing compositions. The historical researches of the Greek historians of the imperial period are inconceivable without a good knowledge of Latin. Most telling of all is the broad unity of elite material culture across the Mediterranean world, especially expressed in their residences, urban and rural alike. No one who comes to elite culture through the elaborate mosaic art of their dining rooms, with its elaborate references to food and myth, astrology and hunting, gladiators and philosophers; or their taste in marble statuary, where gods and monsters and kings and poets jostle for space; or the wall paintings that open up imaginary vistas over cities and landscapes, or make play with stage scenery, or portray gardens full of life; could imagine for a moment that
there were two high cultures rather than one in the Roman Empire.
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Many regional variations existed, of course. But the overwhelming impression is of a single world of the imagination, one accessible through art and literature whether one was in Sicily or southern France, Syria or Asia Minor, in North Africa or in Germany.