The Roman world was one in which formal definitions of status remained important. The distinction between slave and free was a fundamental one, but there was, as mentioned in Chapter 27, among free men the further distinction between the honestiores and humiliores. Senators and the equestrian class were honestiores by virtue of their status and so was the growing class of decuriones. Originally this was a status awarded to the councillors of coloniae and municipia, nominally a hundred of them in a typical city. As with the senators and equestrians there was a wealth requirement and a man needed to be of high local reputation. With time the decuriones became a hereditary class but the demands associated with the status also became a burden as the weight of taxation (which the decuri-ones played an important part in collecting) and the maintenance of their cities became more onerous.
Equestrian and even senatorial rank could be achieved through sheer talent. This became particularly important in the late second century when the military pressures built up (see Chapter 30). While in the settled reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius most governors came from traditional stock, Marcus Aurelius drew on men whose background is often obscure but who could be trusted to calm unsettled provinces or deal with a sudden raid on the empire. So Pertinax, the son of a freedman, began his career as a centurion. His qualities were spotted and he was offered patronage and more senior posts of command until he came to the notice of the emperor. Promoted, he then served in campaigns against the Parthians, moved to Britain, then to the Balkans, and then to Italy where he was a prefect of Rome. These were equestrian posts but Pertinax was finally admitted to the senate, awarded a consulship, and returned to the Balkans for further commands. Not surprisingly there are reports of outrage by traditionalists over his spectacular rise. In fact, his greatest challenge was yet to come (see below, p. 559).
Even if there was a wealth requirement for all these classes, that wealth had to be displayed within conventional ways. High living could be openly despised, as it was by the immensely rich Stoic philosopher Seneca, and vulgar display of wealth would be ridiculed. The classic example in literature is the ostentatious and boorish Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyricon (see above, p. 472). An acceptable approach to
Lavish spending lay in patronage of one’s local city. The opulent library given to the city of Ephesus by the family of one Celsus, who became consul in ad 120, is a fine example. Its fa9ade still stands even if its 12,000 volumes or rolls have long since gone. An alternative was to stage games for the city. On a day-to-day level a great man would have an open house in the sense of making his wealth available for others to enjoy rather than shutting it away behind closed doors. Again in Ephesus, in the recently excavated ‘terraced houses’, one aristocratic house has several dining rooms, graded according to the status of the visiting diner. The size of a man’s entourage was an important mark of his public status. Formal status was reinforced in the public arena by customs such as reserving sections of the theatre for each class.
The patron-client relationship was central to Roman society. It reflected a harsh world in which advancement was difficult without the help of a man of higher status. In the verses of Martial and Juvenal (see below) the client is presented as in a permanent state of humiliation. He abases himself before his patron in order to get fed. However, some accounts give a more sympathetic view of the personal element involved. So the senator Pliny the Younger reports of one Julius Naso, a client whom he was supporting for office:
He has made friends and cultivated friendship, and in my own case, he singled me out for his friend and model, as soon as he could trust his own judgment. He is at my side full of concern when I plead in court or give a reading; he is there to take an interest the moment my trifling works see the light.
A patron would gain prestige from his ability to place his clients and Pliny the Younger goes on to describe his own feeling as he waits for the vote of the senate on a post for Julius. ‘I hang in suspense: I am worried by hope and excited by fear; I do not feel like an ex-consul. For I once more seem to be a candidate myself for all the offices for which I ran. In short, if Naso wins the position he seeks, the honour is his; if he is denied, the rejection is mine.’ The relationship was found at every level of Roman society, the emperor had his clients as did rich senators and provincial grandees. It was so deeply engrained that with the coming of Christianity bishops become patrons (petitioning the emperor for exemptions from tax for their clergy) and even clients in the sense of adopting ‘patron saints’ to represent them at the ‘court’ of the Last Judgement.
However much the patron-client relationship may have helped make everyday life more bearable for some, for the mass of population of the empire this remained a cruel and unforgiving world. For Rome itself the reality of daily life in a city where the gap between rich and poor was immense is vividly documented in the work of two poets of the late first century, Martial, a native of Spain who arrived in the city about ad 64, and Juvenal, from Latium itself. (Martial is best remembered for his numerous surviving Epigrams, Juvenal for his Satires.) Both describe the streets blocked with people, the decaying tenements, with the roof tiles falling from them on to passers-by, the appalling noise of the city. Before dawn it is the bakers who disturb you, says Martial, then the schoolteachers, while all day there is the hammering of coppersmiths, the clinking of the coins of the money changers, the chanting of priests, and the patter of beggars. The rich can move around freely, says Juvenal. They have tall litter-bearers who lift them above the crowds. The poor have to struggle through the mud, being jostled, stepped upon, and subjected to violence. Their homes are no more than flimsy boards, vulnerable to fire and collapse. It is only the rich who can buy peace, the space of a garden, and the security and status provided by a mass of attendants.
Literary sources also provide some details of everyday life in the eastern half of the empire. The Gospels, for instance, provide a vivid picture of life in first-century Palestine (see Chapter 31). For the mid-second century there is Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, the only full-length novel in Latin to have survived. Not much is known of Apuleius. He was a native of the city of Madaura in Africa and appears to have travelled widely in the African provinces lecturing in philosophy. The Golden Ass draws on earlier Greek tales of one Lucius who, while travelling in Thessaly, becomes transformed into an ass. He can only be restored to human form by chewing roses and much of the tale describes his adventures in search of them. He is eventually drawn into a festival to the goddess Isis where he finds the roses he needs. Human again, he becomes an initiate into the mysteries of the goddess (see p. 342). It is an extraordinary novel, especially in its extravagant use of language (which has now been translated to acclaim by the classicist Sarah Ruden).
Both the Gospels and The Golden Ass record the life of the small dusty towns of the east and the countryside surrounding them. It is not a wealthy world and there is little in the way of luxury. Some comfort is provided for the more prosperous inhabitants by the local baths and by the ministrations of servants and slaves. There are social gatherings, weddings, evening dinner parties, and festivals. In the small town of Hypata, the setting for the first part of The Golden Ass, the inhabitants join in the local Festival of Laughter with enthusiasm, crowding into the theatre for a mock trial of Lucius (still at this point in human form).
Alongside such diversions, however, there are continual reminders of the insecurities of life, the prevalence of poverty and disease. As the extraordinary range of medical concoctions outlined in, for example, the Natural History of the Elder Pliny (ad 23-79) shows (‘For fractures of the ribs, goat’s dung applied in old wine is especially extolled. . . recurrent fevers are cured by wearing the right eye of a wolf, salted and attached’), there was no understanding of disease and most afflictions must have remained without effective treatment. This explains why there was such heavy reliance on magic makers and miracle workers. The everyday use of magic pervades The Golden Ass (its setting, Thessaly, was seen as the home of magic and enchantment), and the Gospel accounts show how quickly stories of successful healing spread through the local community. There is a persistence of everyday violence. In The Golden Ass adolescents from the local ‘first families’ are apt to rampage through Hypata in the early hours, picking out foreigners to terrorize. Those with luxury goods keep them secure in a strong room at the centre of their houses with the outside doors barred and guarded by porters. Outside the towns bandits haunt the roads. The authorities bring out the instruments of torture as soon as they have a suspect to question.
Despite the insecurities of everyday life there remains, however, the appearance of an overriding order. There are magistrates and local Roman garrisons. There is some attempt to provide justice, even though little sympathy is given to supposed troublemakers and punishments are cruel. It is possible to travel from one part of Galilee or Thessaly to another while the apostle Paul’s journeys through the eastern empire were extensive. There are inns to welcome the traveller or the possibility of an introduction to a local notable who will provide hospitality. There is the sense of a shared cultural background. In short, society in the empire did have some form of cohesion, even if only of a limited kind. (For a lively account of a journey across Italy see Horace’s Satires 1.5.)
Very little is known about the way of life of the free poor or the margins on which they survived. Most lived on the land, as landless labourers, tenants, or peasant owners, and were subject to all the fluctuations of the seasons and climate. Famine must have been common, and was probably accentuated by the power of the cities to draw in what surpluses of crops remained. For those who were labourers four sestertii seems to have been the maximum possible wage, three or even two sestertii more likely. A miner from Dacia is recorded in an inscription as earning one and a half sestertii a day plus keep. Some prices recorded in Pompeii suggest that a sestertius might buy 2 kilograms of wheat, while one as, a quarter of a sestertius, would buy a plate, a lamp, or a measure of wine. In one Spanish example an as would buy admission to the baths. This suggests a modest but sufficient way of life for a labourer in full-time employment, but much of the work must have been seasonal and unpredictable, the labourers waiting in the market-place, as in the Gospel parables, in the hope of finding a master to employ them. It is also clear that the prices of necessities fluctuated wildly and, at times of shortage, wheat could soar to six or seven times its normal price.
World History
