Conclusion

The picture we gain of Roman leisure is necessarily sketchy, since the evidence has survived in so uneven a manner. Given the scale and longevity of the empire, there must have been tremendous variation across time and space in the habits reviewed above. We must not think, for instance, that tavern life in every Roman city, town, or hamlet was static over the centuries of Roman rule. At the same time, some conditions must have remained basically similar, and continuities surely persisted. This applies equally to the use(s) of the public baths and the nature and mode of staging public banquets. Investigating regional and chronological variations (and continuities) more closely is a task that remains for future studies. Through such investigations, we can only deepen and refine our understanding of the role of leisure in Roman life. Theoretical models and comparative data are useful avenues by which to approach such thematic issues as addressed above, so long as the temptation is resisted to maintain a model in the face of ambiguous evidence rather than adapt the model to explain the evidence. In the last analysis, little can compensate for what the Romans themselves tell us about their otium, patchy and selective as the surviving written sources may be.

Despite these methodological difficulties, some salient points can be made. When viewed from the perspective of the wider cultural history of the Mediterranean basin, Roman public leisure appears to be a ‘‘popularizing’’ of what had for many centuries been the preserves of the privileged. If elaborate dinner parties had previously been a feature of life for a limited few, the Roman public banquet offered them to the masses, on a less luxurious scale. The public baths made sensations widely available that few in earlier societies had had the opportunity to enjoy. The hunts in the amphitheaters and circuses did likewise for this formerly royal pursuit, and the once-aristocratic sport of chariot racing became under the Romans a mass spectator event (see ch. 20). It is a hallmark of Roman culture that it not only prioritized otium conceptually - ‘‘business’’ was negotium (‘‘not-leisure’’), as we have seen - but that it opened access to it to so many.

When reading the sources, there is an impression of a profound disconnect between what the elite did in their spare time (namely, involvement in literature) and

What the masses did (worthless appeasement of bodily urges). This impression, however, is built on the public posturing of the morally upright and socially superior, whose blusterings we should always be wary of accepting at face value. Seneca the Younger, for all his public pronouncements about his frugality, simplicity, personal asceticism, and contempt for contemporary bathing culture died an enormously rich man, in one of his country villas, in a private bathhouse in that villa (Dio 61.10.2-6; Tac. Ann. 15.63-4). If members of the elite pronounced that anyone who mattered ought to spend their spare time among their scrolls and tabellae, it does not mean that they habitually did so. They too could be found at the banquets, taking pleasure in the games, slumming in the taverns, and sharing the baths like everyone else.

In making this observation, however, we must not fall into the trap of supposing that Roman leisure was somehow a ‘‘leveling’’ or ‘‘democratizing’’ valve in an otherwise status-obsessed social hierarchy. Just because many shared it, does not mean they shared it in equal measure. Even if there were exceptions, it is still the case that a status-obsessed senator would not want to be caught dead in a back-street tavern, playing dice with those who made disgusting sounds with their noses and talked endlessly about chariots and horses, as the fourth-century historian Ammianus Marcellinus presents it (Amm. Marc. 14.6.25). Even at literary recitations, which ostensibly united the cultured in a shared appreciation for higher art, hierarchy was maintained by means of quality of seating and proximity to the reader (Juv. 7.39-47). The same sorts of divisions applied at private dinner parties. In its leisure time also, Roman society was obsessed with maintaining the proper distinctions.

The upper classes provided the masses with the means to enjoy many of their voluptates, even as they publicly denigrated those pursuits. It was they who built the public spaces where commoda were offered and it was they who funded the events themselves. Indeed, they were expected to do so: ‘‘the masses are more hostile to a rich man who does not give them a share of his wealth than a poor man who steals from the public funds, for they think that the former’s conduct is due to arrogance and contempt of them, but the latter’s to necessity’’ (Plut. Mor. 822A). In the face of such attitudes, by which the commoners interpreted as contempt a rich person’s reluctance to spend money on them, it is hardly surprising that the elite erected permanent records of their generosity in prominent public places, in the form of the honorific inscriptions that survive for us to read today. These inscriptions represent the essence of euergetism’s social contract: the exchange of private expenditure for public recognition (Veyne 1976). In such a context, we can hardly doubt that the crowds in a town’s baths or the beneficiaries at a public banquet knew who was who. The commemoratory inscriptions themselves are monuments to this fact, in that they stood in prominent spots (often accompanying statues) as permanent reminders to everyone that someone’s largesse had been deployed for the enjoyment of all. Roman leisure, therefore, bears all the indicators of status and hierarchy, of obligation and reciprocity that are the enduring characteristics of the Roman Empire over its long duration. To paraphrase Pliny’s assertion cited in the epigraph of this chapter: by its leisure is the essential character of Roman society revealed.