And overleaf—with elaborate decoration.
The rich had bronze, silver, or even gold lamps with as many as fourteen wicks: One such, according to the Roman poet Martial, could 'Might up an entire feast with its flames." Their rooms were heated by braziers or stoves such as that on the left, made of bronze and dating from around the first century AD. The most luxurious villas were equipped with underfloor heating (pages 46-47).
This ornate brazier supported by the figures of three satyrs warmed a room in a Roman villa in Pompeii. Wood and charcoal were the most common fuels, although in northern Europe the Romans also used coal.
At night as you do your silken dress." Other dental techniques were less advanced; Pliny the Elder recorded the beliefs that a frog tied to the jaws would make loose teeth firm and that toothaches could be relieved with drops of an oil in which earthworms had been boiled.
All water supply systems in classical times were of the constant-flow type—water flowed into the city without interruption, not only when it was needed, as is the case in a modern demand-based system. It was up to the ingenuity of the water engineers to make the best use of the water as it flowed through. Unused water at one Greek fountain would be piped to another a little way down the hill; and in Rome, wastewater from the bathhouses and fountains was often channeled into tanneries, dye-works, or underground sewers. The sewers flowed into the Tiber River, where the effluent must have created a noticeable stench when times of low river flow coincided with hot weather.
Sewers permitted the development of rudimentary water-flushed toilets. These were little more than open channels kept clean by the constant water flow, but they were more advanced than anything achieved by other societies until the mass production of the flush toilet began at the end of the nineteenth century. Large, communal versions could be found in public places; on a smaller scale they were also a feature of well-appointed homes. The Romans used a shared brush, which was rinsed in the running water after use, rather than any kind of toilet paper. However, few of the multistory apartments of the Roman poor had running water, and those that did had it only at ground level. Upstairs residents had to carry their water up flights of steps and resorted to the traditional expedient of throwing the contents of chamber pots out of the window.
In spite of the Roman interest in cleanliness, little was known about the principles of hygiene. Disease was often rampant, and returning cargo vessels and soldiers coming home from foreign campaigns introduced new diseases to populations that had no natural immunity. In the second century AD, some Italian cities lost one-third of their population to smallpox; in Rome itself, at the height of a measles epidemic in the third century AD, 5,000 people a day died from the disease.
Methods of medical treatment were haphazard. The Romans inherited their medical theories from the Greeks, and these theories were an often-dangerous mixture of scientific understanding and ancient doctrine. If a man's wife was sick, he would mix her a remedy himself or buy one from a local herbalist. Physicians applied poultices and fomentations, and tool kits unearthed by archaeologists suggest that surgeons could perform some drastic operations. Beyond these remedies, there was little that could be done for those who were very ill— except perhaps the hopeful sacrifice of a rooster to As-clepius, the god of healing.
In the early years of the first century BC, Rome—originally a small, polislike city in central Italy—extended its citizenship throughout Italy, all of which it then controlled, and thereby shed the last vestiges of the old
City-state. It was then the hub of a nation and an expanding empire. It was to become, in the heyday of the empire, the world's first megalopolis, a city whose population exceeded one million. (The next city to reach this figure was London in the nineteenth century.) Nor was Rome the only major city: The urban centers of the Greek world were Romanized and expanded, and new towns and cities were established, often to serve as regional and commercial centers in the new empire. More than ever before, the city was the place where life was lived and experienced to the full, the site of modernity and progress.
The small houses of the working population were not much of an improvement on their Greek counterparts; many of the multistory apartment houses, cramming as many people as possible into small areas of land, were probably worse. But the rich lived elsewhere, some of their marbled mansions occupying whole blocks. They created their own exclusive residential areas, wishing to emphasize their separateness from the urban poor. And Roman technology, less restricted by terrain and technique than its Greek counterpart, could not only oblige their wishes, it could also be exported to alien climates and lands where it functioned just as successfully as on the Italian mainland.
The Greek tradition of architecture was turned inside out. It is as though Greek buildings were intended to be experienced from the outside, Roman ones from the inside. Two deceptively simple developments made the change possible: the arch and reliable forms of concrete. Neither of these was a Roman invention—like much of Roman civilization, they were forceful developments of the existing knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Etruscans, and other peoples. The semicircular arch and its three-dimensional derivatives, the tunnel vault and the dome, allowed the Romans to capture internal space on a scale much greater than that permitted by Greek post-and-lintel construction. And new and durable cements, especially a strong waterproof variety that used volcanic dust from the Naples area, allowed the new forms great scope.
As far as official culture was concerned, the Romans simply poured old wine into new bottles. Roman gods were Greek gods under new names; Roman philosophy was Greek philosophy with a few minor additions; statuary was often slavishly copied from Greek originals. The Romans saw nothing strange in this: Much of the world they inherited was already run along Greek lines, and for the newcomers, Greek civilization was simply civilization itself, which the Romans embellished and promoted in their own distinctive manner. But beneath this guise of similarity, social changes were evident.
One change, facilitated by the new mastery of interior space, was a shift from public to private. This affected all walks of life, from the governmental down to the domestic. In terms of public life, state matters were now remote from the ordinary citizen: They were decided by senators or the emperor, administered by regional governors and a civil service, and enforced by a huge professional army. In professional life, commerce—deemed vulgar by the Greeks—was now respectable, and a multiplicity of urban trades thrived among the free and slaves alike, providing new opportunities for enterprising individuals. The countryside faded into the background, a mere service region whose sole function was to provide for the needs of the city and its expanding population. And in private life, the citizen now regarded his home as a fit place to inhabit during the day.
The well-off Roman citizen needed more than a residence, and certainly more than just a place to lay his head. He had private business to transact, private affairs to manage, his wealth and influence to oversee. His home therefore had to serve many purposes. It was a showplace of conspicuous consumption, proclaiming his wealth to the world. It also had to provide an appropriate setting for the family of which he was the autocratic head. And it needed to combine the functions of a business office with those of the state residence of a minor potentate.
Such a home was the domus, the urban residence of the successful Roman. Like the Greek house it looked inward, but onto courtyards and colonnades, and perhaps pools and fountains. The main room was called the triclinium—a combined dining room, banqueting hall, and reception chamber, designed to impress the visitors entertained there. Other, smaller rooms served as offices or private reception chambers. As in Greece, there was no clutter of furniture, but there were plenty of painted statues and other works of art. Plain, bare surfaces were buried under a profusion of decoration and color—wall paintings, mosaics, shell-encrusted plasterwork, elaborate draperies. Some of the draperies served to divide rooms and other spaces; the imaginative use of curtains and doors created an adaptable and versatile interior. Curtains were no less potent symbols of privacy than doors; a Roman would not dream of passing through a closed curtain uninvited.
The water that supplied the pools and fountains also served private baths and flush latrines—essential facilities in the eyes of wealthy Romans, and one more means of keeping apart from the public crowd. Sometimes the pools were used to breed exotic fish, a fashionable pastime for the man of affairs. Farther inside the house, the bedroom was a private inner sanctum at some distance from the more public rooms— a far cry from the Greek bedchamber, where a man was likely to be surprised by early-morning visitors.
Only the wealthy and the aristocratic could afford to build, furnish, and maintain an up-to-date domus—but the ideals of Roman domestic life were embodied in these mansions, and the less fortunate aped the homes of the rich as far as they could.
Outside the city limits, the domus was paralleled by the villa, a comfortable rural residence often surrounded by an agricultural estate. In the Italian homelands the villa served primarily as a retreat or holiday home; homebred Romans were city dwellers at heart. Pausanias, a geographer and historian of the second century AD, expressed a typical scorn for the countryside, being unable to understand the appeal of "a place that has neither public buildings, nor gymnasium, nor theater, nor square, nor water to supply a single fountain, and where people live in huts perched on the edge of a ravine." But farther away from the center of the empire things were different: The upper classes born and raised in provinces such as Gaul and Africa were unaccustomed to city life, and in those places small communities sprang up around the principal villa, probably the home of a local noble, which became a center for local industry, commerce, and security.
Overseas villas made free use of local materials and fostered a quality of life that was uniformly high. In colder climates, for example, where houses needed a form of heating more efficient than the portable braziers used by the Greeks, the Romans developed the hypocaust, a form of undergound furnace whose heat and exhaust gases were passed through ducts under the floors of rooms at ground level. Many villas had sophisticated bathing facilities: That belonging to Apollinaris Sidonius in Gaul, for instance, possessed, in the words of its owner, "a hot bathing room the same Size as the adjoining anointing room, apart from the space taken up by the roomy semicircular bathing tub, where hot water in plenty gurgles through a maze of lead pipes coming through holes in the wall. In the hot room it is full daylight: Modest people feel more than naked!"
As wealthy Romans discovered the material pleasures of living apart from the masses, and of spending a greater portion of their lives within their private domains, time-honored social conventions gradually eroded. Although marriage was the fundamental institution of the domestic world, the only legitimate framework for raising the next generation of citizens, it was not universal: Many Roman men preferred to live alone or to enjoy the company of other men. Women, although in all spheres of life still less free than men, were eventually granted a comparable power to end an unsatisfactory marriage. By the first century AD, people were divorcing almost nonchalantly. And the cost of a divorce, whether initiated by the husband or the wife, was borne by the man, for the dowry brought by the wife when she married had to be repaid to her family. For the Roman consul and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, this was a hard lesson to learn. He was delighted, after divorcing his wife, to be able to say that he would never marry again, because he could not manage "philosophy and a wife at the same time." Nevertheless, he soon remarried—the only way he could repay his ex-wife's family was by getting his hands on another dowry.
The dowry system had other consequences. Fathers faced the prospect of large expense on the marriage of a daughter. This increased the likelihood that any infants exposed or killed would be girls, and the result was a serious shortage of marriageable women. Her scarcity value, the dowry, and the ability to divorce her husband gave a woman some power. Her husband was unlikely to view the loss of a wife and her dowry with equanimity, so prudence dictated that he treat her with some indulgence—indeed, if not with kindness.
Some women, pressing their new advantage, managed to lead scandalous lives in the heyday of the empire, and a minority acquired great power behind the scenes. Livia, the second wife of the emperor Augustus, not only managed to survive her husband and several of his successors, but was reputed to have had a hand in the deaths of some of them. Poison was suspected, and indeed was often associated with women: Among uneasy and suspicious men who were used to an unquestioned authority over women, and in an age of poor hygiene when food poisoning was doubtless a frequent occurrence, rumors of poison were all too eagerly believed.
Despite the successes of women who could turn the system to their advantage, however, the system itself remained largely unchanged. The master of any house, the paterfamilias, was an absolute authority in his own home and could deal with its members as he saw fit. He might have a mistress or two outside the house and would probably take his pleasure with the female servants as a matter of course. He might also dabble in pederasty, perhaps because of its old aristocratic associations. And if a man caught his adulterous wife in the act and murdered her on the spot he would almost certainly get away with it, although his fellow citizens might disapprove of his lack of self-control. The same general approach to morality applied as in Greek times, although by now the citizen would probably no longer link his pursuit of virtue to the needs of the state—it had become a purely private affair.
The simplest explanation for this survival of Greek patterns of social behavior was that it suited those in power, and therefore there was no reason to change. And the
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