It was in Italy that the fruits of good administration were most enjoyed. The field survey of southern Etruria carried out by the British School at Rome shows that the first century brought a countryside dotted with comfortable farmhouses and the
Map 13(a)
Map 13(B)
Villas of a richer class. Campania, always one of the most fertile areas of Italy, thanks to its benign climate and volcanic soil, was particularly favoured. A farmhouse such as San Rocco, near Capua, meticulously excavated by the British archaeologist Molly Cotton in the 1960s, became transformed into an opulent villa during the reign of Augustus and in the first century acquired a grand new bath house. Its economic base was also transformed, as commercial opportunities increased. There were new olive presses and tile-making facilities. (When I was working on the dig I was set to work uncovering the dolia, the storage jars in which the fruits of the harvest were stored.) This seemed typical of much of Italy, with agriculture further boosted by the opportunities to export oil, wine, and pottery, for example, to newly pacified parts of the empire. (There is still much of value in Tim Potter’s Roman Italy, London, 1987.)
As richer landowners consolidated their advantages in an expanding market the distribution of wealth in Italy may, however, have become even more unequal. Not the least of the beneficiaries of imperial rule was the traditional senatorial aristocracy—one reason, perhaps, why they were so politically quiescent. A fine example, if from a slightly later period, is provided in the letters of Pliny the Younger (?ad 61-113). His estates were large and prosperous (in a good year his property in Umbria alone brought in 400,000 sestertii). Although he was busy in public life, in the law courts, as an official in the state treasury, as an augur, and, finally, as governor of the province of Bithynia-Pontus in the early second century, he also had ample time to visit his estates and enjoy a cultivated lifestyle, appreciating the peace and beauty of the countryside, reading books in sunny corners of his villas, and writing letters to friends. He was particularly sentimental about his estates around Lake Como, which had been in his family for generations. Although, like Tacitus, with whom he was friendly, Pliny was overawed by Domitian, he presents a more favourable picture of political life among the elite. His letters make no mention of the grotesque cruelties of the court detailed by Tacitus and he writes with real tenderness of his third wife, Calpurnia. This is a world where leisure brings the time to cultivate relationships. Pliny’s correspondence with the emperor Trajan (see below, p. 504) maintains a tone of mutual respect.
As in all periods when wealth is rapidly increasing, the traditional ruling class was confronted by those who had made their money more recently. One senator, Petro-nius, chose to satirize the new rich in his novel The Satyricon. The central character of the surviving fragments is Trimalchio. Born a slave, he boasts at an extravagant dinner party of how he was freed after satisfying the sexual desires of both his master and mistress and became joint inheritor, with the emperor, of his master’s fortune. A lucky trading enterprise gave him the wherewithal to invest in land and thus ape the lifestyle of the aristocracy. In fact, he is completely out of place in their world. He is appallingly ostentatious, enjoys humiliating his slaves, and brags of the monumental tomb he will have erected to his memory, but he indicates, in an exaggerated way, the rich pickings available for a tiny minority. (There is no evidence to suggest that the life of the majority—the tenant farmer or the small peasant producer, for instance—was anything other than hard, even in this time of relative prosperity.)
World History
