The Rise of Rome: The Making of the World's Greatest Empire (42 page)

The urban unit was the
vicus
, a street that functioned as an artery for pedestrians and wheeled traffic and served the neighborhood around it. Each
vicus
had a central point of reference—a crossroads, a sacred grove, a shrine. To qualify officially for
the title of street, or
via
, the Twelve Tables specified that a roadway should be eight feet wide when straight and sixteen at bends; only two roadways merited the title—the Via Sacra and the Via Nova (New Street), which ran between the Forum and the Palatine.

A snatch of dialogue from the comic playwright Publius Terentius Afer (or Terence) from the middle of the second century, conveys the flavor of a well-to-do part of town. A slave is giving someone directions in a city that has no street signs.

“
Do you know that arcade by the market?”

“Of course I do.”

“Go uphill past it, straight along the road. When you get to the top, there’s a slope downward. Rattle your way down that. Next there’s a little shrine on this side, and there’s an alleyway thereabouts.”

“Which one?”

“There’s also a big fig tree.”

“But you can’t get through that alleyway.”

“You’re absolutely right! Really! … I made a mistake: go back to the arcade; yes, you’ll get there much more directly this way, and there isn’t so far to walk. Do you know the house of old Cratinus?”

“I do.”

“When you’ve passed that, go left straight along that road; when you come to the temple of Diana, go to the right. Before you reach the gate, just by the pond, there’s a bakery, and a workshop opposite: that’s where he is.”

On main streets, one- or two-room shops or poky apartments for the poor faced one another along either side. These were usually
open to the passersby and could be secured by wooden shutters. All sorts of goods were sold—food, cloth, kitchenware, jewelry, and books. Bars served wine mixed with water and flavored with herbs, honey, or resin (the ancestor of today’s Greek retsina). Soup with bread, stews, diced roasted meat, sausages, pies, fruit, and filled buns were also on offer, even a kind of proto-pizza. Restaurants with seating catered to the more affluent customer.

THE ROWS OF
shops and apartments protected the houses of the well-to-do, which lay behind them, from the noises and stinks of the street. They were laid out according to a basic pattern on which those with money and space could expand. A front door led through a narrow vestibule to a semi-public waiting room or hallway; this was the
atrium
, with an opening to the sky, and lined on three sides by small dark bedrooms. The side facing the visitor was occupied by a raised space, the
tablinum
, originally the master bedroom but now the owner’s study, with rich frescoes on the walls and the masks of the family’s ancestors on pedestals. Nearby, the
triclinium
was a formal dining room where guests ate elaborate meals lying on couches. The back of the house was the family’s living quarters, dominated by a columned garden courtyard or peristyle. In the bigger houses there was a first floor and a summer
triclinium
by the peristyle.

As always, some parts of town were more fashionable—and costly—than others. The most expensive houses could be found on the Palatine and the Velia, a ridge of ground running down alongside the Sacred Way into the Forum, the hub of élite transactions. The land surrounding the city was taken up with market gardens that produced flowers and vegetables. During the second century, many of these
horti
were purchased by the rich and powerful, who built villas in them: calm, green retreats where they could escape the din and anger of city life. This was
rus in urbe
, an urban countryside.

There was too little space inside the city walls to meet Rome’s requirements, and buildings began to appear on the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars. This was an open area beyond the Capitol that was used for pasturage and military exercises. Scipio Africanus built a villa and garden there. The Circus Flaminius, a public square, was commissioned in 221 for the Plebeian Games by Gaius Flaminius, the populist leader who fell at Lake Trasimene a few years later. It also served as a marketplace and a display area for triumphal booty. There were government structures on the Campus, too; the Ovile was an enclosure rather like a sheep pen where the
comitia centuriata
held its votes; the adjoining Villa Publica, rebuilt and enlarged in 194, was a headquarters for state officials in which the census was taken and troops were levied.

Rome’s increasing wealth in the second century led to civic improvements. The rich and famous built triumphal arches (Scipio among them), porticoes, and basilicas as public amenities. More streets were paved and the drainage system was improved. Concrete,
opus caementicium
, was widely used and new temples were constructed, in the Greek manner, from marble or travertine. But the city’s largest entertainment venue, the Circus Maximus, remained a less than glamorous construction of painted wood.

Rome had a long way to go before it could match the magnificence of the Hellenic cities of the East.

AS EVER, THE
poor had a hard time of it. There were plenty of jobs in service industries such as food supplies (grain, meat, fish), in construction, in retail and crafts of various kinds (ceramics, glassware, metalwork). But Rome’s population was growing rapidly and slaves soaked up much available work. We can assume high levels of unemployment or part-time employment, at least periodically.

Space was at a premium. As in modern cities, developers began to look skyward and built apartment blocks as many as eight stories high. At first, these were rickety wood-framed structures that
had an alarming tendency to catch fire. With the introduction of concrete, something rather more solid was created; the Romans called it an
insula
, or island. This solidity was more apparent than real, however, for
insulae
often collapsed without warning.

Many people joined associations (
collegia, sodalicia, corpora
, or
curiae
), which would give their lives some stability beyond the family. There was little in the way of local government, and no regular police force or fire service. However, the four aediles (two were originally deputies to the tribunes and were joined in 387 by another pair elected by patricians only) were responsible for the upkeep of the city’s fabric, presentation of the Games, the supply of grain and water, and oversight of the markets. Membership in a trade guild, a professional association, or a cult group provided some protection against the vicissitudes and injustice of life. Members of these organizations met regularly (say, once a month), held a sacrifice, and ate a meal together. There were neighborhood societies, which took part in the annual festival of the Compitalia, a celebration in honor of the Lares Compitales, the gods of local crossroads. Some
collegia
were burial clubs, to which members made small, regular financial contributions to pay for their funeral costs.

The state was uneasy about these societies, as its reaction to the Bacchanalia crisis showed, because it did not know what they were up to. At times of political upheaval, they might conspire against good order. But potentially subversive “horizontal” social structures were counteracted by the “vertical” pyramid of the
clientela
. As we have seen, everyone, except those at the very pinnacle of society, was a
cliens
helpful to and dependent on one or more richer patrons. The relationship was hereditary and recognized, albeit not enforced, by law. If a man was lucky enough to be the client of a senator, he was expected to call on this person at home first thing in the morning and accompany him to the Forum; the more followers in a great man’s train, the greater his prestige. In return, he could expect a
sportula
—some food or pocket money.

This system of mutual exchange of goods and services bound
society together and made revolt from below or the emergence of reform movements unlikely. Of course, patrons could sometimes be mean or fall on hard times for one reason or another. Plautus imagines an unemployed and half-starved client lamenting his fate:

Why, just now in the Forum I worked on a couple of
fellows I knew, young lawyers, and, “Going to lunch, then?”
I in my innocence ask. And a terrible silence
settles upon us. Does anyone say “You come too!”?
Heads begin shaking. I tell them a nice little story,
one of my best. God knows how often it’s fed me.
Laughter then? No. Smiles? No.

Rome was a great and growing community, it was the center of government, it was where the action was. In fact, its inhabitants often dispensed with its name and instead referred to it as
urbs
—not any ordinary city but
the
city. However, urban life was corrupting; money made the rich idle, and unemployment did the same for the moneyless. Responsible citizens believed that the countryside was a far, far better place. After all, it was to his small farm that the dictator Cincinnatus retired after saving the state, eschewing glory and wealth. It was from smallholders that the Republic’s victorious legions were recruited. Cicero’s friend the antiquarian and polymath Varro wrote in
De re rustica
, his compendium of country lore: “
It was not without reason that those great men, our ancestors, put the Romans who lived in the country ahead of those who lived in the city.”

An ordinary Roman farmer has left us his summary of the good life in his own words, found on an inscription at Forlì, in Italy. It expresses the tough, hardworking, sober values of the countrymen:

Take all this as true advice, whoever wants to live really well and freely. First, show respect where it is due. Next, want what’s best for your master. Honor your parents. Earn others’ trust. Don’t
speak or listen to slander. If you don’t harm or betray anyone, you will lead a pleasant life, uprightly and happily, giving no offense.

A new generation of politicians emerged after the end of the wars with Carthage, the most able but most unlikable of whom was Marcus Porcius Cato (called the Elder, or the Censor, to distinguish him from his first-century namesake). He came from yeoman stock and spent the earlier years of his adult life, when not fighting in the army, tilling his own fields, just like a latter-day Cincinnatus. Plutarch said of him:

Early in the morning, Cato went on foot to the [local] marketplace and pleaded the cases of all who wished his aid. Then he came back to his farm, where, wearing a working blouse if it was winter, and stripped to the waist if it was summer, he worked alongside his slaves, then sat down with them to eat the same bread and drink the same wine.

Talent-spotted by an aristocratic neighbor, he was introduced to Roman politics in the capital and soon rose to the top.

For Cato, there was something unforgivably Greek about the sophisticated self-indulgences of city life. Every true Roman’s moral guide, the
mos maiorum
, was a treasury of rural virtues. In his book on farming,
De agri cultura
, Cato observed that trade was more profitable than farming, but too risky; the same went for banking, with the addition that it was more dishonorable. By contrast, he wrote, “
it is from the farming class that the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most highly respected, their livelihood is most assured and is looked on with the least hostility.” The citizen, in the field with his plow and on the battlefield with his sword and spear, stood for all that was best about Rome.

Cato did in fact farm his own acres himself, but only when he
was young and poor. An austere hypocrite, he lived very simply but amassed a fortune, against his fine principles, as a moneylender and a property investor. Once he had made his way in the world, he ran his estates as an absentee landlord. He gives the game away in his book. In it, he offers copious practical advice to a landowner like himself, who pays his farm only the occasional visit. The overseer or bailiff, who runs the business on his behalf and manages the workers, some of them slaves and others freeborn, is to be kept on a tight rein:

He must not be a gadabout; he must always be sober, and must not go out to dine. He must keep the farm laborers busy, and see that the master’s orders are carried out. He must not assume that he knows more than the master.… He must not consult a fortune-teller, or prophet, or diviner, or astrologer [an echo here of official fears of Bacchic cults and the like].… He must be the first out of bed, the last to go to bed.

Cato is unsentimental. He wants the laborers to be well enough looked after to function efficiently, but that’s all. They should be either at work or asleep. Failure or illness, even old age, is not to be tolerated:

Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit.

We can blame Cato for his mean-spiritedness and intellectual dishonesty, but the fact is that the heyday of the independent smallholder, tilling his own soil and sending his sons to war, was over. Sixteen years of burning, looting, and destruction by Hannibal’s army had emptied much of the Italian countryside and swelled the
population of Rome. It would take many years for the land to recover, and in some parts of the south it never did.

POVERTY WAS PARTLY
alleviated by fun, albeit in the cause of religion. Throughout the year, groups of days were dedicated to the gods and set aside as holidays. In the city, public and commercial business was suspended, the Senate did not meet, and the city’s routine was interrupted by festivals, or “games.” The oldest were the
ludi Romani
(Roman Games), founded in the days of the kings and celebrated in September. They featured pantomime dances set to flute music, which doubled as both ritual and entertainment, and from 240
B.C
. plays were added to the schedule. The other games were founded during the nerve-racked time of the war with Hannibal and its aftermath, and were attempts either to placate the menacing supernatural order or to express heartfelt thanks for victory.