we are wise in thinking these prosaic inscriptions suitable for our ugly iron bridges. Their more picturesque stone structures tempted the Romans now and then to drop into verse, and to go beyond a bare statement of the facts of construction. Over the Anio in Italy, on a bridge which Narses, the great general of Justinian, restored, the Roman, as he passed, read in graceful verse:[62] “We go on our way with the swift-moving waters of the torrent beneath our feet, and we delight on hearing the roar of the angry water. Go then joyfully at your ease, Quirites, and let the echoing murmur of the stream sing ever of Narses. He who could subdue the unyielding spirit of the Goths has taught the rivers to bear a stern yoke.”
It is an interesting thing to find that the prettiest of the dedicatory poems are in honor of the forest-god Silvanus. One of these poems, Titus Pomponius Victor, the agent of the Cæsars, left inscribed upon a tablet[63] high up in the Grecian Alps. It reads: “Silvanus, half-enclosed in the sacred ash-tree, guardian mighty art thou of this pleasaunce in the heights. To thee we consecrate in verse these thanks, because across the fields and Alpine tops, and through thy guests in sweetly smelling groves, while justice I dispense and the concerns of Cæsar serve, with thy protecting care thou guidest us. Bring me and mine to Rome once more, and grant that we may till Italian fields with thee as guardian. In guerdon therefor will I give a thousand mighty trees.” It is a pretty picture. This deputy of Cæsar has finished his long and perilous journeys through the wilds of the North in the performance of his duties. His face is now turned toward Italy, and his thoughts are fixed on Rome. In this “little garden spot,” as he calls it, in the mountains he pours out his gratitude to the forest-god, who has carried him safely through dangers and brought him thus far on his homeward way, and he vows a thousand trees to his protector. It is too bad that we do not know how the vow was to be paid–not by cutting down the trees, we feel sure. One line of Victor’s little poem is worth quoting in the original. He thanks Silvanus for conducting him in safety “through the mountain heights, and through Tuique luci suave olentis hospites.” Who are the _hospites_? The wild beasts of the forests, we suppose. Now _hospites_ may, of course, mean either “guests” or “hosts,” and it is a pretty conceit of Victor’s to think of the wolves and bears as the guests of the forest-god, as we have ventured to render the phrase in the translation given above. Or, are they Victor’s hosts, whose characters have been so changed by Silvanus that Victor has had friendly help rather than fierce attacks from them?
A very modern practice is revealed by a stone found near the famous temple of Ãsculapius, the god of healing, at Epidaurus in Argolis, upon which two ears are shown in relief, and below them the Latin couplet:[64] “Long ago Cutius Gallus had vowed these ears to thee, scion of PhÅbus, and now he has put them here, for thou hast healed his ears.” It is an ancient ex-voto, and calls to mind on the one hand the cult of Ãsculapius, which Walter Pater has so charmingly portrayed in Marius the Epicurean, and on the other hand it shows us that the practice of setting up ex-votos, of which one sees so many at shrines and in churches across the water to-day, has been borrowed from the pagans. A pretty bit of sentiment is suggested by an inscription[65] found near the ancient village of Ucetia in Southern France: “This shrine to the Nymphs have I built, because many times and oft have I used this spring when an old man as well as a youth.”
All of the verses which we have been considering up to this point have come down to us more or less carefully engraved upon stone, in honor of some god, to record some achievement of importance, or in memory of a departed friend. But besides these formal records of the past, we find a great many hastily scratched or painted sentiments or notices, which have a peculiar interest for us because they are the careless effusions or unstudied productions of the moment, and give us the atmosphere of antiquity as nothing else can do. The stuccoed walls of the houses, and the sharp-pointed stylus which was used in writing on wax tablets offered too strong a temptation for the lounger or passer-by to resist. To people of this class, and to merchants advertising their wares, we owe the three thousand or more graffiti found at Pompeii. The ephemeral inscriptions which were intended for practical purposes, such as the election notices, the announcements of gladiatorial contests, of houses to rent, of articles lost and for sale, are in prose, but the lovelorn lounger inscribed his sentiments frequently in verse, and these verses deserve a passing notice here. One man of this class in his erotic ecstasy writes on the wall of a Pompeian basilica:[66] “May I perish if I’d wish to be a god without thee.” That hope sprang eternal in the breast of the Pompeian lover is illustrated by the last two lines of this tragic declaration:[67]
“If you can and won’t,
Give me hope no more.
Hope you foster and you ever
Bid me come again to-morrow.
Force me then to die
Whom you force to live
A life apart from you.
Death will be a boon,
Not to be tormented.
Yet what hope has snatched away
To the lover hope gives back.”
This effusion has led another passer-by to write beneath it the Delphic sentiment: “May the man who shall read this never read anything else.” The symptoms of the ailment in its most acute form are described by some Roman lover in the verses which he has left us on the wall of Caligula’s palace, on the Palatine:[68]
“No courage in my heart,
No sleep to close my eyes,
A tide of surging love
Throughout the day and night.”
This seems to come from one who looks upon the lover with a sympathetic eye, but who is himself fancy free:
“Whoever loves, good health to him, And perish he who knows not how,
But doubly ruined may he be
Who will not yield to love’s appeal.”[69]
The first verse of this little poem,
“Quisquis amat valeat, pereat qui nescit amare,”
represented by the first couplet of the English rendering, calls to mind the swinging refrain which we find a century or two later in the _Pervigilium Veneris_, that last lyrical outburst of the pagan world, written for the eve of the spring festival of Venus:
“Cras amet qui nunquam amavit quique amavit eras amet.”
(To-morrow he shall love who ne’er has loved And who has loved, to-morrow he shall love.)
An interesting study might be made of the favorite types of feminine beauty in the Roman poets. Horace sings of the “golden-haired” Pyrrhas, and Phyllises, and Chloes, and seems to have had an admiration for blondes, but a poet of the common people, who has recorded his opinion on this subject in the atrium of a Pompeian house, shows a more catholic taste, although his freedom of judgment is held in some constraint:
“My fair girl has taught me to hate Brunettes with their tresses of black. I will hate if I can, but if not,
‘Gainst my will I must love them also.”[70]
On the other hand, one Pompeian had such an inborn dread of brunettes that, whenever he met one, he found it necessary to take an appropriate antidote, or prophylactic:
“Whoever loves a maiden dark
By charcoal dark is he consumed.
When maiden dark I light upon
I eat the saving blackberry.”[71]
These amateur poets do not rely entirely upon their own Muse, but borrow from Ovid, Propertius, or Virgil, when they recall sentiments in those writers which express their feelings. Sometimes it is a tag, or a line, or a couplet which is taken, but the borrowings are woven into the context with some skill. The poet above who is under compulsion from his blonde sweetheart, has taken the second half of his production verbatim from Ovid, and for the first half of it has modified a line of Propertius. Other writers have set down their sentiments in verse on more prosaic subjects. A traveller on his way to the capital has scribbled these lines on the wall, perhaps of a wine-shop where he stopped for refreshment:[72]
“Hither have we come in safety.
Now I hasten on my way,
That once more it may be mine
To behold our Lares, Rome.”
At one point in a Pompeian street, the eye of a straggler would catch this notice in doggerel verse:[73]
“Here’s no place for loafers.
Lounger, move along!”
On the wall of a wine-shop a barmaid has thus advertised her wares:[74]
“Here for a cent is a drink,
Two cents brings something still better. Four cents in all, if you pay,
Wine of Falernum is yours.”
It must have been a lineal descendant of one of the parasites of Plautus who wrote:[75]
“A barbarian he is to me
At whose house I’m not asked to dine.”
Here is a sentiment which sounds very modern:
“The common opinion is this:
That property should be divided.”[76]
This touch of modernity reminds one of another group of verses which brings antiquity into the closest possible touch with some present-day practices. The Romans, like ourselves, were great travellers and sightseers, and the marvels of Egypt in particular appealed to them, as they do to us, with irresistible force. Above all, the great statue of Memnon, which gave forth a strange sound when it was struck by the first rays of the rising sun, drew travellers from far and near. Those of us who know the Mammoth Cave, Niagara Falls, the Garden of the Gods, or some other of our natural wonders, will recall how fond a certain class of visitors are of immortalizing themselves by scratching their names or a sentiment on the walls or the rocks which form these marvels. Such inscriptions We find on the temple walls in Egypt–three of them appear on the statue of Memnon, recording in verse the fact that the writers had visited the statue and heard the voice of the god at sunrise. One of these Egyptian travellers, a certain Roman lady journeying up the Nile, has scratched these verses on a wall of the temple at Memphis:[77]
“The pyramids without thee have I seen, My brother sweet, and yet, as tribute sad, The bitter tears have poured adown my cheek, And sadly mindful of thy absence now
I chisel here this melancholy note.”
Then follow the name and titles of the absent brother, who is better known to posterity from these scribbled lines of a Cook’s tourist than from any official records which have come down to us. All of these pieces of popular poetry which we have been discussing thus far were engraved on stone, bronze, stucco, or on some other durable material. A very few bits of this kind of verse, from one to a half dozen lines in length, have come down to us in literature. They have the unique distinction, too, of being specimens of Roman folk poetry, and some of them are found in the most unlikely places. Two of them are preserved by a learned commentator on the Epistles of Horace. They carry us back to our school-boy days. When we read
“The plague take him who’s last to reach me,”[78]
we can see the Roman urchin standing in the market-place, chanting the magic formula, and opposite him the row of youngsters on tiptoe, each one waiting for the signal to run across the intervening space and be the first to touch their comrade. What visions of early days come back to us–days when we clasped hands in a circle and danced about one or two children placed in the centre of the ring, and chanted in unison some refrain, upon reading in the same commentator to Horace a ditty which runs:[79]
“King shall you be
If you do well.
If you do ill
You shall not be.”
The other bits of Roman folk poetry which we have are most of them preserved by Suetonius, the gossipy biographer of the Cæsars. They recall very different scenes. Cæsar has returned in triumph to Rome, bringing in his train the trousered Gauls, to mingle on the street with the toga-clad Romans. He has even had the audacity to enroll some of these strange peoples in the Roman senate, that ancient body of dignity and convention, and the people chant in the streets the ditty:[80]
“Cæsar leads the Gauls in triumph, In the senate too he puts them.
Now they’ve donned the broad-striped toga And have laid aside their breeches.”
Such acts as these on Cæsar’s part led some political versifier to write on Cæsar’s statue a couplet which contrasted his conduct with that of the first great republican, Lucius Brutus:
“Brutus drove the kings from Rome,
And first consul thus became.
This man drove the consuls out,
And at last became the king.”[81]
We may fancy that these verses played no small part in spurring on Marcus Brutus to emulate his ancestor and join the conspiracy against the tyrant. With one more bit of folk poetry, quoted by Suetonius, we may bring our sketch to an end. Germanicus Cæsar, the flower of the imperial family, the brilliant general and idol of the people, is suddenly stricken with a mortal illness. The crowds throng the streets to hear the latest news from the sick-chamber of their hero. Suddenly the rumor flies through the streets that the crisis is past, that Germanicus will live, and the crowds surge through the public squares chanting:
“Saved now is Rome,
Saved too the land,
Saved our Germanicus.”[82]
The Origin of the Realistic Romance among the Romans
One of the most fascinating and tantalizing problems of literary history concerns the origin of prose fiction among the Romans. We can trace the growth of the epic from its infancy in the third century before Christ as it develops in strength in the poems of Nævius, Ennius, and Cicero until it reaches its full stature in the _Ãneid_, and then we can see the decline of its vigor in the _Pharsalia_, the _Punica_, the _Thebais_, and _Achilleis_, until it practically dies a natural death in the mythological and historical poems of Claudian. The way also in which tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, history, biography, and the other types of literature in prose and verse came into existence and developed among the Romans can be followed with reasonable success. But the origin and early history of the novel is involved in obscurity. The great realistic romance of Petronius of the first century of our era is without a legally recognized ancestor and has no direct descendant. The situation is the more surprising when we recall its probable size in its original form. Of course only a part of it has come down to us, some one hundred and ten pages in all. Its great size probably proved fatal to its preservation in its complete form, or at least contributed to that end, for it has been estimated that it ran from six hundred to nine hundred pages, being longer, therefore, than the average novel of Dickens and Scott. Consequently we are not dealing with a bit of ephemeral literature, but with an elaborate composition of a high degree of excellence, behind which we should expect to find a long line of development. We are puzzled not so much by the utter absence of anything in the way of prose fiction before the time of Petronius as by the difficulty of establishing any satisfactory logical connection between these pieces of literature and the romance of Petronius. We are bewildered, in fact, by the various possibilities which the situation presents. The work shows points of similarity with several antecedent forms of composition, but the gaps which lie in any assumed line of descent are so great as to make us question its correctness.
If we call to mind the present condition of this romance and those characteristic features of it which are pertinent to the question at issue, the nature of the problem and its difficulty also will be apparent at once. Out of the original work, in a rather fragmentary form, only four or five main episodes are extant, one of which is the brilliant story of the Dinner of Trimalchio. The action takes place for the most part in Southern Italy, and the principal characters are freedmen who have made their fortunes and degenerate freemen who are picking up a precarious living by their wits. The freemen, who are the central figures in the novel, are involved in a great variety of experiences, most of them of a disgraceful sort, and the story is a story of low life. Women play an important rôle in the narrative, more important perhaps than they do in any other kind of ancient literature–at least their individuality is more marked. The efficient motif is erotic. I say the efficient, because the conventional motif which seems to account for all the misadventures of the anti-hero Encolpius is the wrath of an offended deity. A great part of the book has an atmosphere of satire about it which piques our curiosity and baffles us at the same time, because it is hard to say how much of this element is inherent in the subject itself, and how much of it lies in the intention of the author. It is the characteristic of parvenu society to imitate smart society to the best of its ability, and its social functions are a parody of the like events in the upper set. The story of a dinner party, for instance, given by such a _nouveau riche_ as Trimalchio, would constantly remind us by its likeness and its unlikeness, by its sins of omission and commission, of a similar event in correct society. In other words, it would be a parody on a proper dinner, even if the man who described the event knew nothing about the usages of good society, and with no ulterior motive in mind set down accurately the doings of his upstart characters. For instance, when Trimalchio’s chef has three white pigs driven into the dining-room for the ostensible purpose of allowing the guests to pick one out for the next course, with the memory of our own monkey breakfasts and horseback dinners in mind, we may feel that this is a not improbable attempt on the part of a Roman parvenu to imitate his betters in giving a dinner somewhat out of the ordinary. Members of the smart set at Rome try to impress their guests by the value and weight of their silver plate. Why shouldn’t the host of our story adopt the more direct and effective way of accomplishing the same object by having the weight of silver engraved on each article? He does so. It is a very natural thing for him to do. In good society they talk of literature and art. Why isn’t it natural for Trimalchio to turn the conversation into the same channels, even if he does make Hannibal take Troy and does confuse the epic heroes and some late champions of the gladiatorial ring?
In other words, much of that which is satirical in Petronius is so only because we are setting up in our minds a comparison between the doings of his rich freedmen and the requirements of good taste and moderation. But it seems possible to detect a satirical or a cynical purpose on the part of the author carried farther than is involved in the choice of his subject and the realistic presentation of his characters. Petronius seems to delight in putting his most admirable sentiments in the mouths of contemptible characters. Some of the best literary criticism we have of the period, he presents through the medium of the parasite rhetorician Agamemnon. That happy phrase characterizing Horace’s style, “curiosa felicitas,” which has perhaps never been equalled in its brevity and appositeness, is coined by the incorrigible poetaster Eumolpus. It is he too who composes and recites the two rather brilliant epic poems incorporated into the _Satirae_, one of which is received with a shower of stones by the bystanders. The impassioned eulogy of the careers of Democritus, Chrysippus, Lysippus, and Myron, who had endured hunger, pain, and weariness of body and mind for the sake of science, art, and the good of their fellow-men, and the diatribe against the pursuit of comfort and pleasure which characterized the people of his own time, are put in the mouth of the same _roué_ Eumolpus.
These situations have the true Horatian humor about them. The most serious and systematic discourse which Horace has given us, in his Satires, on the art of living, comes from the crack-brained Damasippus, who has made a failure of his own life. In another of his poems, after having set forth at great length the weaknesses of his fellow-mortals, Horace himself is convicted of being inconsistent, a slave to his passions, and a victim of hot temper by his own slave Davus. We are reminded again of the literary method of Horace in his Satires when we read the dramatic description of the shipwreck in Petronius. The blackness of night descends upon the water; the little bark which contains the hero and his friends is at the mercy of the sea; Lichas, the master of the vessel, is swept from the deck by a wave, Encolpius and his comrade Giton prepare to die in each other’s embrace, but the tragic scene ends with a ridiculous picture of Eumolpus bellowing out above the roar of the storm a new poem which he is setting down upon a huge piece of parchment. Evidently Petronius has the same dread of being taken too seriously which Horace shows so often in his Satires. The cynical, or at least unmoral, attitude of Petronius is brought out in a still more marked way at the close of this same passage. Of those upon the ill-fated ship the degenerates Encolpius, Giton, and Eumolpus, who have wronged Lichas irreparably, escape, while the pious Lichas meets a horrible death. All this seems to make it clear that not only does the subject which Petronius has treated inevitably involve a satire upon contemporary society, but that the author takes a satirical or cynical attitude toward life.
Another characteristic of the story is its realism. There are no marvellous adventures, and in fact no improbable incidents in it. The author never obtrudes his own personality upon us, as his successor Apuleius sometimes does, or as Thackeray has done. We know what the people in the story are like, not from the author’s description of them, but from their actions, from the subjects about which they talk, and from the way in which they talk. Agamemnon converses as a rhetorician might talk, Habinnas like a millionnaire stone-cutter, and Echion like a rag-dealer, and their language and style are what we should expect from men of their standing in society and of their occupations. The conversations of Trimalchio and his freedmen guests are not witty, and their jests are not clever. This adherence to the true principles of realism is the more noteworthy in the case of so brilliant a writer as Petronius, and those of us who recall some of the preternaturally clever conversations in the pages of Henry James and other contemporary novelists may feel that in this respect he is a truer artist than they are.
The novel of Petronius has one other characteristic which is significant, if we attempt to trace the origin of this type of literature. It is cast in the prose-poetic form, that is, passages in verse are inserted here and there in the narrative. In a few cases they are quoted, but for the most part they are the original compositions of the novelist. They range in length from couplets to poems of three hundred lines. Sometimes they form an integral part of the narrative, or again they illustrate a point, elaborate an idea in poetry, or are exercises in verse.
We have tried to bring out the characteristic features of this romance in order that we may see what the essential elements are of the problem which faces one in attempting to explain the origin of the type of literature represented by the work of Petronius. What was there in antecedent literature which will help us to understand the appearance on Italian soil in the first century of our era of a long erotic story of adventure, dealing in a realistic way with every-day life, marked by a satirical tone and with a leaning toward the prose-poetic form? This is the question raised by the analysis, which we have made above, of the characteristics of the story. We have no ambitious hope of solving it, yet the mere statement of a puzzling but interesting problem is stimulating to the imagination and the intellect, and I am tempted to take up the subject because the discovery of certain papyri in Egypt within recent years has led to the formulation of a new theory of the origin of the romance of perilous adventure, and may, therefore, throw some light on the source of our realistic novel of every-day life. My purpose, then, is to speak briefly of the different genres of literature of the earlier period with which the story of Petronius may stand in some direct relation, or from which the suggestion may have come to Petronius for his work. Several of these lines of possible descent have been skilfully traced by others. In their views here and there I have made some modifications, and I have called attention to one or two types of literature, belonging to the earlier period and heretofore unnoticed in this connection, which may help us to understand the appearance of the realistic novel.
It seems a far cry from this story of sordid motives and vulgar action to the heroic episodes of epic poetry, and yet the _Satirae_ contain not a few more or less direct suggestions of epic situations and characters. The conventional motif of the story of Petronius is the wrath of an offended deity. The narrative in the _Odyssey_ and the _Ãneid_ rests on the same basis. The ship of their enemy Lichas on which Encolpius and his companions are cooped up reminds them of the cave of the Cyclops; Giton hiding from the town-crier under a mattress is compared to Ulysses underneath the sheep and clinging to its wool to escape the eye of the Cyclops, while the woman whose charms engage the attention of Encolpius at Croton bears the name of Circe. It seems to be clear from these reminiscences that Petronius had the epic in mind when he wrote his story, and his novel may well be a direct or an indirect parody of an epic narrative. Rohde in his analysis of the serious Greek romance of the centuries subsequent to Petronius has postulated the following development for that form of story: Travellers returning from remote parts of the world told remarkable stories of their experiences. Some of these stories took a literary form in the _Odyssey_ and the Tales of the Argonauts. They appeared in prose, too, in narratives like the story of Sinbad the Sailor, of a much later date. A more definite plot and a greater dramatic intensity were given to these tales of adventure by the addition of an erotic element which often took the form of two separated lovers. Some use is made of this element, for instance, in the relations of Odysseus and Penelope, perhaps in the episode of Ãneas and Dido, and in the story of Jason and Medea. The intrusion of the love motif into the stories told of demigods and heroes, so that the whole narrative turns upon it, is illustrated by such tales in the Metamorphoses of Ovid as those of Pyramus and Thisbe, Pluto and Proserpina, or Meleager and Atalanta. The love element, which may have been developed in this way out of its slight use in the epic, and the element of adventure form the basis of the serious Greek romances of Antonius Diogenes, Achilles Tatius, and the other writers of the centuries which follow Petronius.
Before trying to connect the _Satirae_ with a serious romance of the type just mentioned, let us follow another line of descent which leads us to the same objective point, viz., the appearance of the serious story in prose. We have been led to consider the possible connection of this kind of prose fiction with the epic by the presence in both of them of the love element and that of adventure. But the Greek novel has another rather marked feature. It is rhetorical, and this quality has suggested that it may have come, not from the epic, but from the rhetorical exercise. Support has been given to this theory within recent years by the discovery in Egypt of two fragments of the Ninos romance. The first of these fragments reveals Ninos, the hero, pleading with his aunt Derkeia, the mother of his sweetheart, for permission to marry his cousin. All the arguments in support of his plea and against it are put forward and balanced one against the other in a very systematic way. He wins over Derkeia. Later in the same fragment the girl pleads in a somewhat similar fashion with Thambe, the mother of Ninos. The second fragment is mainly concerned with the campaigns of Ninos. Here we have the two lovers, probably separated by the departure of Ninos for the wars, while the hero, at least, is exposed to the danger of the campaign.
The point was made after the text of this find had been published that the large part taken in the tale by the carefully balanced arguments indicated that the story grew out of exercises in argumentation in the rhetorical schools.[83] The elder Seneca has preserved for us in his _Controversiae_ specimens of the themes which were set for students in these schools. The student was asked to imagine himself in a supposed dilemma and then to discuss the considerations which would lead him to adopt the one or the other line of conduct. Some of these situations suggest excellent dramatic possibilities, conditions of life, for instance, where suicide seemed justifiable, misadventures with pirates, or a turn of affairs which threatened a woman’s virtue. Before the student reached the point of arguing the case, the story must be told, and out of these narratives of adventure, told at the outset to develop the dilemma, may have grown the romance of adventure, written for its own sake. The story of Ninos has a peculiar interest in connection with this theory, because it was probably very short, and consequently may give us the connecting link between the rhetorical exercise and the long novel of the later period, and because it is the earliest known serious romance. On the back of the papyrus which contains it are some farm accounts of the year 101 A.D. Evidently by that time the roll had become waste paper, and the story itself may have been composed a century or even two centuries earlier. So far as this second theory is concerned, we may raise the question in passing whether we have any other instance of a genre of literature growing out of a school-boy exercise. Usually the teacher adapts to his purpose some form of creative literature already in existence.
Leaving this objection out of account for the moment, the romance of love and perilous adventure may possibly be then a lineal descendant either of the epic or of the rhetorical exercise. Whichever of these two views is the correct one, the discovery of the Ninos romance fills in a gap in one theory of the origin of the realistic romance of Petronius, and with that we are here concerned. Before the story of Ninos was found, no serious romance and no title of such a romance anterior to the time of Petronius was known. This story, as we have seen, may well go back to the first century before Christ, or at least to the beginning of our era. It is conceivable that stories like it, but now lost, existed even at an earlier date. Now in the century, more or less, which elapsed between the assumed date of the appearance of these Greek narratives and the time of Petronius, the extraordinary commercial development of Rome had created a new aristocracy–the aristocracy of wealth. In harmony with this social change the military chieftain and the political leader who had been the heroes of the old fiction gave way to the substantial man of affairs of the new, just as Thaddeus of Warsaw has yielded his place in our present-day novels to Silas Lapham, and the bourgeois erotic story of adventure resulted, as we find it in the extant Greek novels of the second and third centuries of our era. If we can assume that this stage of development was reached before the time of Petronius we can think of his novel as a parody of such a romance. If, however, the bourgeois romance had not appeared before 50 A.D., then, if we regard his story as a parody of a prose narrative, it must be a parody of such an heroic romance as that of Ninos, or a parody of the longer heroic romances which developed out of the rhetorical narrative. If excavations in Egypt or at Herculaneum should bring to light a serious bourgeois story of adventure, they would furnish us the missing link. Until, or unless, such a discovery is made the chain of evidence is incomplete.
The two theories of the realistic romance which we have been discussing assume that it is a parody of some anterior form of literature, and that this fact accounts for the appearance of the satirical or cynical element in it. Other students of literary history, however, think that this characteristic was brought over directly from the Milesian tale[84] or the Menippean satire.[85] To how many different kinds of stories the term “Milesian tale” was applied by the ancients is a matter of dispute, but the existence of the short story before the time of Petronius is beyond question. Indeed we find specimens of it. In its commonest form it presented a single episode of every-day life. It brought out some human weakness or foible. Very often it was a story of illicit love. Its philosophy of life was: No man’s honesty and no woman’s virtue are unassailable. In all these respects, save in the fact that it presents one episode only, it resembles the _Satirae_ of Petronius. At least two stories of this type are to be found in the extant fragments of the novel of Petronius. One of them is related as a well-known tale by the poet Eumolpus, and the other is told by him as a personal experience. More than a dozen of them are imbedded in the novel of Apuleius, the _Metamorphoses_, and modern specimens of them are to be seen in Boccaccio and in Chaucer. In fact they are popular from the twelfth century down to the eighteenth. Long before the time of Petronius they occur sporadically in literature. A good specimen, for instance, is found in a letter commonly attributed to Ãschines in the fourth century B.C. As early as the first century before Christ collections of them had been made and translated into Latin. This development suggests an interesting possible origin of the realistic romance. In such collections as those just mentioned of the first century B.C., the central figures were different in the different stories, as is the case, for instance, in the Canterbury Tales. Such an original writer as Petronius was may well have thought of connecting these different episodes by making them the experiences of a single individual. The Encolpius of Petronius would in that case be in a way an ancient Don Juan. If we compare the Arabian Nights with one of the groups of stories found in the Romances of the Round Table, we can see what this step forward would mean. The tales which bear the title of the Arabian Nights all have the same general setting and the same general treatment, and they are put in the mouth of the same story-teller. The Lancelot group of Round Table stories, however, shows a nearer approach to unity since the stories in it concern the same person, and have a common ultimate purpose, even if it is vague. When this point had been reached the realistic romance would have made its appearance. We have been thinking of the realistic novel as being made up of a series of Milesian tales. We may conceive of it, however, as an expanded Milesian tale, just as scholars are coming to think of the epic as growing out of a single hero-song, rather than as resulting from the union of several such songs.
To pass to another possibility, it is very tempting to see a connection between the _Satirae_ of Petronius and the prologue of comedy. Plautus thought it necessary to prefix to many of his plays an account of the incidents which preceded the action of the play. In some cases he went so far as to outline in the prologue the action of the play itself in order that the spectators might follow it intelligently. This introductory narrative runs up to seventy-six lines in the _Menaechmi_, to eighty-two in the _Rudens_, and to one hundred and fifty-two in the _Amphitruo_. In this way it becomes a short realistic story of every-day people, involving frequently a love intrigue, and told in the iambic senarius, the simplest form of verse. Following it is the more extended narrative of the comedy itself, with its incidents and dialogue. This combination of the condensed narrative in the story form, presented usually as a monologue in simple verse, and the expanded narrative in the dramatic form, with its conversational element, may well have suggested the writing of a realistic novel in prose. A slight, though not a fatal, objection to this theory lies in the fact that the prologues to comedy subsequent to Plautus changed in their character, and contain little narrative. This is not a serious objection, for the plays of Plautus were still known to the cultivated in the later period.
The mime gives us still more numerous points of contact with the work of Petronius than comedy does.[86] It is unfortunate, both for our understanding of Roman life and for our solution of the question before us, that only fragments of this form of dramatic composition have come down to us. Even from them, however, it is clear that the mime dealt with every-day life in a very frank, realistic way. The new comedy has its conventions in the matter of situations and language. The matron, for instance, must not be presented in a questionable light, and the language is the conversational speech of the better classes. The mime recognizes no such restrictions in its portrayal of life. The married woman, her stupid husband, and her lover are common figures in this form of the drama, and if we may draw an inference from the lately discovered fragments of Greek mimes, the speech was that of the common people. Again, the new comedy has its limited list of stock characters–the old man, the tricky slave, the parasite, and the others which we know so well in Plautus and Terence, but as for the mime, any figure to be seen on the street may find a place in it–the rhetorician, the soldier, the legacy-hunter, the inn-keeper, or the town-crier. The doings of kings and heroes were parodied. We are even told that a comic Hector and Achilles were put on the stage, and the gods did not come off unscathed. All of these characteristic features of the mime remind us in a striking way of the novel of Petronius. His work, like the mime, is a realistic picture of low life which presents a great variety of characters and shows no regard for conventional morals. It is especially interesting to notice the element of parody, which we have already observed in Petronius, in both kinds of literary productions. The theory that Petronius may have had the composition of his _Satirae_ suggested to him by plays of this type is greatly strengthened by the fact that the mime reached its highest point of popularity at the court in the time of Nero, in whose reign Petronius lived. In point of fact Petronius refers to the mime frequently. One of these passages is of peculiar significance in this connection. Encolpius and his comrades are entering the town of Croton and are considering what device they shall adopt so as to live without working. At last a happy idea occurs to Eumolpus, and he says: “Why don’t we construct a mime?” and the mime is played, with Eumolpus as a fabulously rich man at the point of death, and the others as his attendants. The rôle makes a great hit, and all the vagabonds in the company play their assumed parts in their daily life at Croton with such skill that the legacy-hunters of the place load them with attentions and shower them with presents. This whole episode, in fact, may be thought of as a mime cast in the narrative form, and the same conception may be applied with great plausibility to the entire story of Encolpius.
We have thus far been attacking the question with which we are concerned from the side of the subject-matter and tone of the story of Petronius. Another method of approach is suggested by the Menippean satire,[87] the best specimens of which have come down to us in the fragments of Varro, one of Cicero’s contemporaries. These satires are an _olla podrida_, dealing with all sorts of subjects in a satirical manner, sometimes put in the dialogue form and cast in a _mélange_ of prose and verse. It is this last characteristic which is of special interest to us in this connection, because in the prose of Petronius verses are freely used. Sometimes, as we have observed above, they form an integral part of the narrative, and again they merely illustrate or expand a point touched on in the prose. If it were not aside from our immediate purpose it would be interesting to follow the history of this prose-poetical form from the time of Petronius on. After him it does not seem to have been used very much until the third and fourth centuries of our era. However, Martial in the first century prefixed a prose prologue to five books of his Epigrams, and one of these prologues ends with a poem of four lines. The several books of the _Silvae_ of Statius are also preceded by prose letters of dedication. That strange imitation of the _Aulularia_ of Plautus, of the fourth century, the _Querolus_, is in a form half prose and half verse. A sentence begins in prose and runs off into verse, as some of the epitaphs also do. The Epistles of Ausonius of the same century are compounded of prose and a great variety of verse. By the fifth and sixth centuries, a _mélange_ of verse or a combination of prose and verse is very common, as one can see in the writings of Martianus Capella, Sidonius Apollinaris, Ennodius, and Boethius. It recurs again in modern times, for instance in Dante’s _La Vita Nuova_, in Boccaccio, _Aucassin et Nicolette_, the _Heptameron_, the _Celtic Ballads_, the _Arabian Nights_, and in _Alice in Wonderland_.
A little thought suggests that the prose-poetic form is a natural medium of expression. A change from prose to verse, or from one form of verse to another, suggests a change in the emotional condition of a speaker or writer. We see that clearly enough illustrated in tragedy or comedy. In the thrilling scene in the _Captives of Plautus_, for example, where Tyndarus is in mortal terror lest the trick which he has played on his master, Hegio, may be discovered, and he be consigned to work in chains in the quarries, the verse is the trochaic septenarius. As soon as the suspense is over, it drops to the iambic senarius. If we should arrange the commoner Latin verses in a sequence according to the emotional effects which they produce, at the bottom of the series would stand the iambic senarius. Above that would come trochaic verse, and we should rise to higher planes of exaltation as we read the anapæstic, or cretic, or bacchiac. The greater part of life is commonplace. Consequently the common medium for conversation or for the narrative in a composition like comedy made up entirely of verse is the senarius. Now this form of verse in its simple, almost natural, quantitative arrangement is very close to prose, and it would be a short step to substitute prose for it as the basis of the story, interspersing verse here and there to secure variety, or when the emotions were called into play, just as lyric verses are interpolated in the iambic narrative. In this way the combination of different kinds of verse in the drama, and the prosimetrum of the Menippean satire and of Petronius, may be explained, and we see a possible line of descent from comedy and this form of satire to the _Satirae_.
These various theories of the origin of the romance of Petronius–that it may be related to the epic, to the serious heroic romance, to the bourgeois story of adventure developed out of the rhetorical exercise, to the Milesian tale, to the prologue of comedy, to the _verse-mélange_ of comedy or the mime, or to the prose-poetical Menippean satire–are not, of necessity, it seems to me, mutually exclusive. His novel may well be thought of as a parody of the serious romance, with frequent reminiscences of the epic, a parody suggested to him by comedy and its prologue, by the mime, or by the short cynical Milesian tale, and cast in the form of the Menippean satire; or, so far as subject-matter and realistic treatment are concerned, the suggestion may have come directly from the mime, and if we can accept the theory of some scholars who have lately studied the mime, that it sometimes contained both prose and verse, we may be inclined to regard this type of literature as the immediate progenitor of the novel, even in the matter of external form, and leave the Menippean satire out of the line of descent. Whether the one or the other of these explanations of its origin recommends itself to us as probable, it is interesting to note, as we leave the subject, that, so far as our present information goes, the realistic romance seems to have been the invention of Petronius.
Diocletian’s Edict and the High Cost of Living
The history of the growth of paternalism in the Roman Empire is still to be written. It would be a fascinating and instructive record. In it the changes in the character of the Romans and in their social and economic conditions would come out clearly. It would disclose a strange mixture of worthy and unworthy motives in their statesmen and politicians, who were actuated sometimes by sympathy for the poor, sometimes by a desire for popular favor, by an honest wish to check extravagance or immorality, or by the fear that the discontent of the masses might drive them into revolution. We should find the Roman people, recognizing the menace to their simple, frugal way of living which lay in the inroads of Greek civilization, and turning in their helplessness to their officials, the censors, to protect them from a demoralization which, by their own efforts, they could not withstand. We should find the same officials preaching against race suicide, extravagant living, and evasion of public duties, and imposing penalties and restrictions in the most autocratic fashion on men of high and low degree alike who failed to adopt the official standards of conduct. We should read of laws enacted in the same spirit, laws restricting the number of guests that might be entertained on a single occasion, and prescribing penalties for guests and host alike, if the cost of a dinner exceeded the statutory limit. All this belongs to the early stage of paternal government. The motives were praiseworthy, even if the results were futile.
With the advent of the Gracchi, toward the close of the second century before our era, moral considerations become less noticeable, and paternalism takes on a more philanthropic and political character. We see this change reflected in the land laws and the corn laws. To take up first the free distribution of land by the state, in the early days of the Republic colonies of citizens were founded in the newly conquered districts of Italy to serve as garrisons on the frontier. It was a fair bargain between the citizen and the state. He received land, the state, protection. But with Tiberius Gracchus a change comes in. His colonists were to be settled in peaceful sections of Italy; they were to receive land solely because of their poverty. This was socialism or state philanthropy. Like the agrarian bill of Tiberius, the corn law of Gaius Gracchus, which provided for the sale of grain below the market price, was a paternal measure inspired in part by sympathy for the needy. The political element is clear in both cases also. The people who were thus favored by assignments of land and of food naturally supported the leaders who assisted them. Perhaps the extensive building of roads which Gaius Gracchus carried on should be mentioned in this connection. The ostensible purpose of these great highways, perhaps their primary purpose, was to develop Italy and to facilitate communication between different parts of the peninsula, but a large number of men was required for their construction, and Gaius Gracchus may well have taken the matter up, partly for the purpose of furnishing work to the unemployed. Out of these small beginnings developed the socialistic policy of later times. By the middle of the first century B.C., it is said that there were three hundred and twenty thousand persons receiving doles of corn from the state, and, if the people could look to the government for the necessities of life, why might they not hope to have it supply their less pressing needs? Or, to put it in another way, if one politician won their support by giving them corn, why might not another increase his popularity by providing them with amusement and with the comforts of life? Presents of oil and clothing naturally follow, the giving of games and theatrical performances at the expense of the state, and the building of porticos and public baths. As the government and wealthy citizens assumed a larger measure of responsibility for the welfare of the citizens, the people became more and more dependent upon them and less capable of managing their own affairs. An indication of this change we see in the decline of local self-government and the assumption by the central administration of responsibility for the conduct of public business in the towns of Italy. This last consideration suggests another phase of Roman history which a study of paternalism would bring out–I mean the effect of its introduction on the character of the Roman people.
The history of paternalism in Rome, when it is written, might approach the subject from several different points. If the writer were inclined to interpret history on the economic side, he might find the explanation of the change in the policy of the government toward its citizens in the introduction of slave labor which, under the Republic, drove the free laborer to the wall and made him look to the state for help, in the decline of agriculture, and the growth of capitalism. The sociologist would notice the drift of the people toward the cities and the sudden massing there of large numbers of persons who could not provide for themselves and in their discontent might overturn society. The historian who concerns himself with political changes mainly, would notice the socialistic legislation of the Gracchi and their political successors and would connect the growth of paternalism with the development of democracy. In all these explanations there would be a certain measure of truth.
But I am not planning here to write a history of paternalism among the Romans. That is one of the projects which I had been reserving for the day when the Carnegie Foundation should present me with a wooden sword and allow me to retire from the arena of academic life. But, alas! the trustees of that beneficent institution, by the revision which they have lately made of the conditions under which a university professor may withdraw from active service, have in their wisdom put off that day of academic leisure to the Greek Kalends, and my dream vanishes into the distance with it.
Here I wish to present only an episode in this history which we have been discussing, an episode which is unique, however, in ancient and, so far as I know, in modern history. Our knowledge of the incident comes from an edict of the Emperor Diocletian, and this document has a direct bearing on a subject of present-day discussion, because it contains a diatribe against the high cost of living and records the heroic attempt which the Roman government made to reduce it. In his effort to bring prices down to what he considered a normal level, Diocletian did not content himself with such half-measures as we are trying in our attempts to suppress combinations in restraint of trade, but he boldly fixed the maximum prices at which beef, grain, eggs, clothing, and other articles could be sold, and prescribed the penalty of death for any one who disposed of his wares at a higher figure. His edict is a very comprehensive document, and specifies prices for seven hundred or eight hundred different articles. This systematic attempt to regulate trade was very much in keeping with the character of Diocletian and his theory of government. Perhaps no Roman emperor, with the possible exception of Hadrian, showed such extraordinary administrative ability and proposed so many sweeping social reforms as Diocletian did. His systematic attempt to suppress Christianity is a case in point, and in the last twenty years of his reign he completely reorganized the government. He frankly introduced the monarchical principle, fixed upon a method of succession to the throne, redivided the provinces, established a carefully graded system of officials, concerned himself with court etiquette and dress, and reorganized the coinage and the system of taxation. We are not surprised therefore that he had the courage to attack this difficult question of high prices, and that his plan covered almost all the articles which his subjects would have occasion to buy.
It is almost exactly two centuries since the first fragments of the edict dealing with the subject were brought to light. They were discovered in Caria, in 1709, by William Sherard, the English consul at Smyrna. Since then, from time to time, other fragments of tablets containing parts of the edict have been found in Egypt, Asia Minor, and Greece. At present portions of twenty-nine copies of it are known. Fourteen of them are in Latin and fifteen in Greek. The Greek versions differ from one another, while the Latin texts are identical, except for the stone-cutters’ mistakes here and there. These facts make it clear that the original document was in Latin, and was translated into Greek by the local officials of each town where the tablets were set up. We have already noticed that specimens of the edict have not been found outside of Egypt, Greece, and Asia Minor, and this was the part of the Roman world where Diocletian ruled. Scholars have also observed that almost all the manufactured articles which are mentioned come from Eastern points. From these facts it has been inferred that the edict was to apply to the East only, or perhaps more probably that Diocletian drew it up for his part of the Roman world, and that before it could be applied to the West it was repealed.
From the pieces which were then known, a very satisfactory reconstruction of the document was made by Mommsen and published in the _Corpus of Latin Inscriptions_.[88]
The work of restoration was like putting together the parts of a picture puzzle where some of the pieces are lacking. Fragments are still coming to light, and possibly we may have the complete text some day. As it is, the introduction is complete, and perhaps four-fifths of the list of articles with prices attached are extant. The introduction opens with a stately list of the titles of the two Augusti and the two Cæsars, which fixes the date of the proclamation as 301 A.D. Then follows a long recital of the circumstances which have led the government to adopt this drastic method of controlling prices. This introduction is one of the most extraordinary pieces of bombast, mixed metaphors, loose syntax, and incoherent expressions that Latin literature possesses. One is tempted to infer from its style that it was the product of Diocletian’s own pen. He was a man of humble origin, and would not live in Rome for fear of being laughed at on account of his plebeian training. The florid and awkward style of these introductory pages is exactly what we should expect from a man of such antecedents.
It is very difficult to translate them into intelligible English, but some conception of their style and contents may be had from one or two extracts. In explaining the situation which confronts the world, the Emperor writes: “For, if the raging avarice … which, without regard for mankind, increases and develops by leaps and bounds, we will not say from year to year, month to month, or day to day, but almost from hour to hour, and even from minute to minute, could be held in check by some regard for moderation, or if the welfare of the people could calmly tolerate this mad license from which, in a situation like this, it suffers in the worst possible fashion from day to day, some ground would appear, perhaps, for concealing the truth and saying nothing; … but inasmuch as there is only seen a mad desire without control, to pay no heed to the needs of the many, … it seems good to us, as we look into the future, to us who are the fathers of the people, that justice intervene to settle matters impartially, in order that that which, long hoped for, humanity itself could not bring about may be secured for the common government of all by the remedies which our care affords…. Who is of so hardened a heart and so untouched by a feeling for humanity that he can be unaware, nay that he has not noticed, that in the sale of wares which are exchanged in the market, or dealt with in the daily business of the cities, an exorbitant tendency in prices has spread to such an extent that the unbridled desire of plundering is held in check neither by abundance nor by seasons of plenty!”
If we did not know that this was found on tablets sixteen centuries old, we might think that we were reading a newspaper diatribe against the cold-storage plant or the beef trust. What the Emperor has decided to do to remedy the situation he sets forth toward the end of the introduction. He says: “It is our pleasure, therefore, that those prices which the subjoined written summary specifies, be held in observance throughout all our domain, that all may know that license to go above the same has been cut off…. It is our pleasure (also) that if any man shall have boldly come into conflict with this formal statute, he shall put his life in peril…. In the same peril also shall he be placed who, drawn along by avarice in his desire to buy, shall have conspired against these statutes. Nor shall he be esteemed innocent of the same crime who, having articles necessary for daily life and use, shall have decided hereafter that they can be held back, since the punishment ought to be even heavier for him who causes need than for him who violates the laws.”
The lists which follow are arranged in three columns which give respectively the article, the unit of measure, and the price.[89]
Frumenti KÌMÌ
Hordei KÌMÌ unum â
©Ì¶ c(entum) Centenum sive sicale ” ” ” â
©Ì¶ sexa(ginta) Mili pisti ” ” ” â
©Ì¶ centu(m)
Mili integri ” ” â
©Ì¶ quinquaginta’
The first item (frumentum) is wheat, which is sold by the KÌMÌ (kastrensis modius=18½ quarts), but the price is lacking. Barley is sold by the kastrensis modius at ⠩̶ centum (centum denarii = 43 cents) and so on.
Usually a price list is not of engrossing interest, but the tables of Diocletian furnish us a picture of material conditions throughout the Empire in his time which cannot be had from any other source, and for that reason deserve some attention. This consideration emboldens me to set down some extracts in the following pages from the body of the edict:
Extracts from Diocletian’s List of Maximum Prices
I
In the tables given here the Latin and Greek names of the articles listed have been turned into English. The present-day accepted measure of quantity–for instance, the bushel or the quart–has been substituted for the ancient unit, and the corresponding price for the modern unit of measure is given. Thus barley was to be sold by the kastrensis modius (=18½ quarts) at 100 denarii (=43.5 cents). At this rate a bushel of barley would have brought 74.5 cents. For convenience in reference the numbers of the chapters and of the items adopted in the text of Mommsen are used here. Only selected articles are given.
(Unit of Measure, the Bushel)
1 Wheat
2 Barley 74.5 cents 3 Rye 45 ” 4 Millet, ground 74.5 ” 6 Millet, whole 37 ” 7 Spelt, hulled 74.5 ” 8 Spelt, not hulled 22.5 ” 9 Beans, ground 74.5 ” 10 Beans, not ground 45 ” 11 Lentils 74.5 ” 12-16 Peas, various sorts 45-74.5 ” 17 Oats 22.5 ” 31 Poppy seeds $1.12 34 Mustard $1.12 35 Prepared mustard, quart 6 “
II
(Unit of Measure, the Quart)
1a Wine from Picenum 22.5 cents 2 Wine from Tibur 22.5 ” 7 Wine from Falernum 22.5 ” 10 Wine of the country 6 ” 11-12 Beer 1.5-3 “
III
(Unit of Measure, the Quart)
1a Oil, first quality 30.3 cents 2 Oil, second quality 18 ” 5 Vinegar 4.3 ” 8 Salt, bushel 74.5 ” 10 Honey, best 30.3 ” 11 Honey, second quality 15 “
IV
(Unit, Unless Otherwise Noted, Pound Avoirdupois)
1a Pork 7.3 cents 2 Beef 4.9 ” 3 Goat’s flesh or mutton 4.9 ” 6 Pig’s liver 9.8 ” 8 Ham, best 12 ” 21 Goose, artificially fed (1) 87 ” 22 Goose, not artificially fed (1) 43.5 ” 23 Pair of fowls 36 ” 29 Pair of pigeons 10.5 ” 47 Lamb 7.3 ” 48 Kid 7.3 ” 50 Butter 9.8 “
V
(Unit, the Pound)
1a Sea fish with sharp spines 14.6 cents 2 Fish, second quality 9.7 ” 3 River fish, best quality 7.3 ” 4 Fish, second quality 4.8 ” 5 Salt fish 8.3 ” 6 Oysters (by the hundred) 43.5 ” 11 Dry cheese 7.3 ” 12 Sardines 9.7 “
VI
1 Artichokes, large (5) 4.3 cents 7 Lettuce, best (5) 1.7 ” 9 Cabbages, best (5) 1.7 ” 10 Cabbages, small (10) 1.7 ” 18 Turnips, large (10) 1.7 ” 24 Watercress, per bunch of 20 4.3 ” 28 Cucumbers, first quality (10) 1.7 ” 29 Cucumbers, small (20) 1.7 ” 34 Garden asparagus, per bunch (25) 2.6 ” 35 Wild asparagus (50) 1.7 ” 38 Shelled green beans, quart 3 ” 43 Eggs (4) 1.7 ” 46 Snails, large (20) 1.7 ” 65 Apples, best (10) 1.7 ” 67 Apples, small (40) 1.7 ” 78 Figs, best (25) 1.7 ” 80 Table grapes (2.8 pound) 1.7 ” 95 Sheep’s milk, quart 6 ” 96 Cheese, fresh, quart 6 “
VII
(Where (k) Is Set Down the Workman Receives His “Keep” Also)
1a Manual laborer (k) 10.8 cents 2 Bricklayer (k) 21.6 ” 3 Joiner (interior work) (k) 21.6 ” 3a Carpenter (k) 21.6 ” 4 Lime-burner (k) 21.6 ” 5 Marble-worker (k) 26 ” 6 Mosaic-worker (fine work) (k) 26 ” 7 Stone-mason (k) 21.6 ” 8 Wall-painter (k) 32.4 ” 9 Figure-painter (k) 64.8 ” 10 Wagon-maker (k) 21.6 ” 11 Smith (k) 21.6 ” 12 Baker (k) 21.6 ” 13 Ship-builder, for sea-going ships (k) 26 ” 14 Ship-builder, for river boats (k) 21.6 ” 17 Driver, for camel, ass, or mule (k) 10.8 ” 18 Shepherd (k) 8.7 ” 20 Veterinary, for cutting, and straightening hoofs, per animal 2.6 ” 22 Barber, for each man .9 cent 23 Sheep-shearer, for each sheep (k) .9 ” 24a Coppersmith, for work in brass, per pound 3.5 cents 25 Coppersmith, for work in copper, per pound 2.6 ” 26 Coppersmith for finishing vessels, per pound 2.6 ” 27 Coppersmith, for finishing figures and statues, per pound 1.7 ” 29 Maker of statues, etc., per day (k) 32.4 ” 31 Water-carrier, per day (k) 10.9 ” 32 Sewer-cleaner, per day (k) 10.9 ” 33 Knife-grinder, for old sabre 10.9 ” 36 Knife-grinder, for double axe 3.5 ” 39 Writer, 100 lines best writing 10.9 ” 40 Writer, 100 lines ordinary writing 8.7 ” 41 Document writer for record of 100 lines 4.3 ” 42 Tailor, for cutting out and finishing overgarment of first quality 26.1 ” 43 Tailor, for cutting out and finishing overgarment of second quality 17.4 ” 44 For a large cowl 10.9 ” 45 For a small cowl 8.7 ” 46 For trousers 8.7 ” 52 Felt horse-blanket, black or white, 3 pounds weight 43.5 ” 53 Cover, first quality, with embroidery, 3 pounds weight $1.09 64 Gymnastic teacher, per pupil, per month 21.6 cents 65 Employee to watch children, per child, per month 21.6 ” 66 Elementary teacher, per pupil, per month 21.6 ” 67 Teacher of arithmetic, per pupil, per month 32.6 ” 68 Teacher of stenography, per pupil, per month 32.6 ” 69 Writing-teacher, per pupil, per month 21.6 ” 70 Teacher of Greek, Latin, geometry, per pupil, per month 87 ” 71 Teacher of rhetoric, per pupil, per month $1.09 72 Advocate or counsel for presenting a case $1.09 73 For finishing a case $4.35 74 Teacher of architecture, per pupil, per month 43.5 cents 75 Watcher of clothes in public bath, for each patron .9 cent
VIII
1a Hide, Babylonian, first quality $2.17 2 Hide, Babylonian, second quality $1.74 4 Hide, PhÅnician (?) 43 cents 6a Cowhide, unworked, first quality $2.17 7 Cowhide, prepared for shoe soles $3.26 9 Hide, second quality, unworked $1.31 10 Hide, second quality, worked $2.17 11 Goatskin, large, unworked 17 cents 12 Goatskin, large, worked 22 ” 13 Sheepskin, large, unworked 8.7 ” 14 Sheepskin, large, worked 18 ” 17 Kidskin, unworked 4.3 ” 18 Kidskin, worked 7 ” 27 Wolfskin, unworked 10.8 ” 28 Wolfskin, worked 17.4 ” 33 Bearskin, large, unworked 43 ” 39 Leopardskin, unworked $4.35 41 Lionskin, worked $4.35
IX
5a Boots, first quality, for mule-drivers and peasants, per pair, without nails 52 cents 6 Soldiers’ boots, without nails 43 ” 7 Patricians’ shoes 65 ” 8 Senatorial shoes 43 ” 9 Knights’ shoes 30.5 ” 10 Women’s boots 26 ” 11 Soldiers’ shoes 32.6 ” 15 Cowhide shoes for women, double soles 21.7 ” 16 Cowhide shoes for women, single soles 13 ” 20 Men’s slippers 26 ” 21 Women’s slippers 21.7 “
XVI
8a Sewing-needle, finest quality 1.7 cents 9 Sewing-needle, second quality .9 cent
XVII
1 Transportation, 1 person, 1 mile .9 cent 2 Rent for wagon, 1 mile 5 cents 3 Freight charges for wagon containing up to 1,200 pounds, per mile 8.7 ” 4 Freight charges for camel load of 600 pounds, per mile 3.5 ” 5 Rent for laden ass, per mile 1.8 ” 7 Hay and straw, 3 pounds .9 cent
XVIII
1a Goose-quills, per pound 43.5 cents 11a Ink, per pound 5 ” 12 Reed pens from Paphos (10) 1.7 ” 13 Reed pens, second quality (20) 1.7 “
XIX
1 Military mantle, finest quality $17.40 2 Undergarment, fine $8.70 3 Undergarment, ordinary $5.44 5 White bed blanket, finest sort, 12 pounds weight $6.96 7 Ordinary cover, 10 pounds weight $2.18 28 Laodicean Dalmatica [_i.e., a tunic with sleeves_] $8.70 36 British mantle, with cowl $26.08 39 Numidian mantle, with cowl $13.04 42 African mantle, with cowl $6.52 51 Laodicean storm coat, finest quality $21.76 60 Gallic soldier’s cloak $43.78 61 African soldier’s cloak $2.17
XX
1a For an embroiderer, for embroidering a half-silk undergarment, per ounce 87 cents 5 For a gold embroiderer, if he work in gold, for finest work, per ounce $4.35 9 For a silk weaver, who works on stuff half-silk, besides “keep,” per day 11 cents
XXI
2 For working Tarentine or Laodicean or other foreign wool, with keep, per pound 13 cents 5 A linen weaver for fine work, with keep, per day 18 “
XXII
4 Fuller’s charges for a cloak or mantle, new 13 cents 6 Fuller’s charges for a woman’s coarse Dalmatica, new 21.7 ” 9 Fuller’s charges for a new half-silk undergarment 76 ” 22 Fuller’s charges for a new Laodicean mantle. 76 “
XXIII
1 White silk, per pound $52.22
XXIV
1 Genuine purple silk, per pound $652.20 2 Genuine purple wool, per pound $217.40 3 Genuine light purple wool, per pound $139.26 8 Nicæan scarlet wool, per pound $6.53
XXV
1 Washed Tarentine wool, per pound 76 cents 2 Washed Laodicean wool, per pound 65 ” 3 Washed wool from Asturia, per pound 43.5 ” 4 Washed wool, best medium quality, per pound 21.7 ” 5 All other washed wools, per pound 10.8 “
XXVI
7a Coarse linen thread, first quality, per pound $3.13 8 Coarse linen thread, second quality, per pound $2.61 9 Coarse linen thread, third quality, per pound $1.96
XXX
1 Pure gold in bars or in coined pieces, per pound 50,000 denarii 3 Artificers, working in metal, per pound $21.76 4 Gold-beaters, per pound $13.06
Throughout the lists, as one may see, articles are grouped in a systematic way. First we find grain and vegetables; then wine, oil, vinegar, salt, honey, meat, fish, cheese, salads, and nuts. After these articles, in chapter VII, we pass rather unexpectedly to the wages of the field laborer, the carpenter, the painter, and of other skilled and unskilled workmen. Then follow leather, shoes, saddles, and other kinds of raw material and manufactured wares until we reach a total of more than eight hundred articles. As we have said, the classification is in the main systematic, but there are some strange deviations from a systematic arrangement. Eggs, for instance, are in table VI with salads, vegetables, and fruits. Bücher, who has discussed some phases of this price list, has acutely surmised that perhaps the tables in whole, or in part, were drawn up by the directors of imperial factories and magazines. The government levied tribute “in kind,” and it must have provided depots throughout the provinces for the reception of contributions from its subjects. Consequently in making out these tables it would very likely call upon the directors of these magazines for assistance, and each of them in making his report would naturally follow to some extent the list of articles which the imperial depot controlled by him, carried in stock. At all events, we see evidence of an expert hand in the list of linens, which includes one hundred and thirty-nine articles of different qualities.
As we have noticed in the passage quoted from the introduction, it is unlawful for a person to charge more for any of his wares than the amount specified in the law. Consequently, the prices are not normal, but maximum prices. However, since the imperial lawgivers evidently believed that the necessities of life were being sold at exorbitant rates, the maximum which they fixed was very likely no greater than the prevailing market price. Here and there, as in the nineteenth chapter of the document, the text is given in tablets from two or more places. In such cases the prices are the same, so that apparently no allowance was made for the cost of carriage, although with some articles, like oysters and sea-fish, this item must have had an appreciable value, and it certainly should have been taken into account in fixing the prices of “British mantles” or “Gallic soldiers’ cloaks” of chapter XIX. The quantities for which prices are given are so small–a pint of wine, a pair of fowls, twenty snails, ten apples, a bunch of asparagus–that evidently Diocletian had the “ultimate consumer” in mind, and fixed the retail price in his edict. This is fortunate for us, because it helps us to get at the cost of living in the early part of the fourth century. There is good reason for believing that the system of barter prevailed much more generally at that time than it does to-day. Probably the farmer often exchanged his grain, vegetables, and eggs for shoes and cloth, without receiving or paying out money, so that the money prices fixed for his products would not affect him in every transaction as they would affect the present-day farmer. The unit of money which is used throughout the edict is the copper denarius, and fortunately the value of a pound of fine gold is given as 50,000 denarii. This fixes the value of the denarius as .4352 cent, or approximately four-tenths of a cent. It is implied in the introduction that the purpose of the law is to protect the people, and especially the soldiers, from extortion, but possibly, as Bücher has surmised, the emperor may have wished to maintain or to raise the value of the denarius, which had been steadily declining because of the addition of alloy to the coin. If this was the emperor’s object, possibly the value of the denarius is set somewhat too high, but it probably does not materially exceed its exchange value, and in any case, the relative values of articles given in the tables are not affected.
The tables bring out a number of points of passing interest. From chapter II it seems to follow that Italian wines retained their ancient pre-eminence, even in the fourth century. They alone are quoted among the foreign wines. Table VI gives us a picture of the village market. On market days the farmer brings his artichokes, lettuce, cabbages, turnips, and other fresh vegetables into the market town and exposes them for sale in the public square, as the country people in Italy do to-day. The seventh chapter, in which wages are given, is perhaps of liveliest interest. In this connection we should bear in mind the fact that slavery existed in the Roman Empire, that owners of slaves trained them to various occupations and hired them out by the day or job, and that, consequently the prices paid for slave labor fixed the scale of wages. However, there was a steady decline under the Empire in the number of slaves, and competition with them in the fourth century did not materially affect the wages of the free laborer. It is interesting, in this chapter, to notice that the teacher and the advocate (Nos. 66-73) are classed with the carpenter and tailor. It is a pleasant passing reflection for the teacher of Greek and Latin to find that his predecessors were near the top of their profession, if we may draw this inference from their remuneration when compared with that of other teachers. It is worth observing also that the close association between the classics and mathematics, and their acceptance as the corner-stone of the higher training, to which we have been accustomed for centuries, seems to be recognized (VII, 70) even at this early date. We expect to find the physician mentioned with the teacher and advocate, but probably it was too much even for Diocletian’s skill, in reducing things to a system, to estimate the comparative value of a physician’s services in a case of measles and typhoid fever.
The bricklayer, the joiner, and the carpenter (VII, 2-3a), inasmuch as they work on the premises of their employer, receive their “keep” as well as a fixed wage, while the knife-grinder and the tailor (VII, 33, 42) work in their own shops, and naturally have their meals at home. The silk-weaver (XX, 9) and the linen-weaver (XXI, 5) have their “keep” also, which seems to indicate that private houses had their own looms, which is quite in harmony with the practices of our fathers. The carpenter and joiner are paid by the day, the teacher by the month, the knife-grinder, the tailor, the barber (VII, 22) by the piece, and the coppersmith (VII, 24a-27) according to the amount of metal which he uses. Whether the difference between the prices of shoes for the patrician, the senator, and the knight (IX, 7-9) represents a difference in the cost of making the three kinds, or is a tax put on the different orders of nobility, cannot be determined. The high prices set on silk and wool dyed with purple (XXIV) correspond to the pre-eminent position of that imperial color in ancient times. The tables which the edict contains call our attention to certain striking differences between ancient and modern industrial and economic conditions. Of course the list of wage-earners is incomplete. The inscriptions which the trades guilds have left us record many occupations which are not mentioned here, but in them and in these lists we miss any reference to large groups of men who hold a prominent place in our modern industrial reports–I mean men working in printing-offices, factories, foundries, and machine-shops, and employed by transportation companies. Nothing in the document suggests the application of power to the manufacture of articles, the assembling of men in a common workshop, or the use of any other machine than the hand loom and the mill for the grinding of corn. In the way of articles offered for sale, we miss certain items which find a place in every price-list of household necessities, such articles as sugar, molasses, potatoes, cotton cloth, tobacco, coffee, and tea. The list of stimulants (II) is, in fact, very brief, including as it does only a few kinds of wine and beer.
At the present moment, when the high cost of living is a subject which engages the attention of the economist, politician, and householder, as it did that of Diocletian and his contemporaries, the curious reader will wish to know how wages and the prices of food in 301 A.D. compare with those of to-day. In the two tables which follow, such a comparison is attempted for some of the more important articles and occupations.
Articles of Food[90]
Price in 301 A.D. Price in 1906 A.D.
Wheat, per bushel 33.6 cents $1.19[91] Rye, per bushel 45 ” 79 cents[91] Beans, per bushel 45 ” $3.20 Barley, per bushel 74.5 ” 55 cents[91] Vinegar, per quart 4.3 ” 5-7 ” Fresh pork, per pound 7.3 ” 14-16 ” Beef, per pound 4.9 ” { 9-12 ” {15-18 “
Mutton, per pound 4.9 ” 13-16 ” Ham, per pound 12 ” 18-25 ” Fowls, per pair 26 “
Fowls, per pound 14-18 ” Butter, per pound 9.8 ” 26-32 ” Fish, river, fresh, per pound 7.3 ” 12-15 ” Fish, sea, fresh, per pound 9-14 ” 8-14 cents Fish, salt, per pound 8.3 ” 8-15 ” Cheese, per pound 7.3 ” 17-20 ” Eggs, per dozen 5.1 ” 25-30 ” Milk, cow’s, per quart 6-8 ” Milk, sheep’s, per quart 6 “
Wages Per Day
Unskilled workman 10.8 cents (k)[92] $1.20-2.24[93] Bricklayer 21.6 ” (k) 4.50-6.50 Carpenter 21.6 ” (k) 2.50-4.00 Stone-mason 21.6 ” (k) 3.70-4.90 Painter 32.4 ” (k) 2.75-4.00 Blacksmith 21.6 ” (k) 2.15-3.20 Ship-builder 21-26 ” (k) 2.15-3.50
We are not so much concerned in knowing the prices of meat, fish, eggs, and flour in 301 and 1911 A.D. as we are in finding out whether the Roman or the American workman could buy more of these commodities with the returns for his labor. A starting point for such an estimate is furnished by the Eighteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, on the “Cost of Living and Retail Prices of Food” (1903), and by Bulletin No. 77 of the Bureau of Labor (1908). In the first of these documents (pp. 582, 583) the expenditure for rent, fuel, food, and other necessities of life in 11,156 normal American families whose incomes range from $200 to $1,200 per year is given. In the other report (p. 344 _f._) similar statistics are given for 1,944 English urban families. In the first case the average amount spent per year was $617, of which $266, or a little less than a half of the entire income, was used in the purchase of food. The statistics for England show a somewhat larger relative amount spent for food. Almost exactly one-third of this expenditure for the normal American family was for meat and fish.[94] Now, if we take the wages of the Roman carpenter, for instance, as 21 cents per day, and add one-fourth or one-third for his “keep,” those of the same American workman as $2.50 to $4.00, it is clear that the former received only a ninth or a fifteenth as much as the latter, while the average price of pork, beef, mutton, and ham (7.3 cents) in 301 A.D. was about a third of the average (19.6 cents) of the same articles to-day. The relative averages of wheat, rye, and barley make a still worse showing for ancient times while fresh fish was nearly as high in Diocletian’s time as it is in our own day. The ancient and modern prices of butter and eggs stand at the ratio of one to three and one to six respectively. For the urban workman, then, in the fourth century, conditions of life must have been almost intolerable, and it is hard to understand how he managed to keep soul and body together, when almost all the nutritious articles of food were beyond his means. The taste of meat, fish, butter, and eggs must have been almost unknown to him, and probably even the coarse bread and vegetables on which he lived were limited in amount. The peasant proprietor who could raise his own cattle and grain would not find the burden so hard to bear.
Only one question remains for us to answer. Did Diocletian succeed in his bold attempt to reduce the cost of living? Fortunately the answer is given us by Lactantius in the book which he wrote in 313-314 A.D., “On the Deaths of Those Who Persecuted (the Christians).” The title of Lactantius’s work would not lead us to expect a very sympathetic treatment of Diocletian, the arch-persecutor, but his account of the actual outcome of the incident is hardly open to question. In Chapter VII of his treatise, after setting forth the iniquities of the Emperor in constantly imposing new burdens on the people, he writes: “And when he had brought on a state of exceeding high prices by his different acts of injustice, he tried to fix by law the prices of articles offered for sale. Thereupon, for the veriest trifles much blood was shed, and out of fear nothing was offered for sale, and the scarcity grew much worse, until, after the death of many persons, the law was repealed from mere necessity.” Thus came to an end this early effort to reduce the high cost of living. Sixty years later the Emperor Julian made a similar attempt on a small scale. He fixed the price of corn for the people of Antioch by an edict. The holders of grain hoarded their stock. The Emperor brought supplies of it into the city from Egypt and elsewhere and sold it at the legal price. It was bought up by speculators, and in the end Julian, like Diocletian, had to acknowledge his inability to cope with an economic law.
Private Benefactions and Their Effect on the Municipal Life of the Romans
In the early days the authority of the Roman father over his wife, his sons, and his daughters was absolute. He did what seemed to him good for his children. His oversight and care extended to all the affairs of their lives. The state was modelled on the family and took over the autocratic power of the paterfamilias. It is natural to think of it, therefore, as a paternal government, and the readiness with which the Roman subordinated his own will and sacrificed his personal interests to those of the community seems to show his acceptance of this theory of his relation to the government. But this conception is correct in part only. A paternal government seeks to foster all the common interests of its people and to provide for their common needs. This the Roman state did not try to do, and if we think of it as a paternal government, in the ordinary meaning of that term, we lose sight of the partnership between state supervision and individual enterprise in ministering to the common needs and desires, which was one of the marked features of Roman life. In fact, the gratification of the individual citizen’s desire for those things which he could not secure for himself depended in the Roman Empire, as it depends in this country, not solely on state support, but in part on state aid, and in part on private generosity. We see the truth of this very clearly in studying the history of the Roman city. The phase of Roman life which we have just noted may not fit into the ideas of Roman society which we have hitherto held, but we can understand it as no other people can, because in the United States and in England we are accustomed to the co-operation of private initiative and state action in the establishment and maintenance of universities, libraries, museums, and all sorts of charitable institutions.
If we look at the growth of private munificence under the Republic, we shall see that citizens showed their generosity particularly in the construction of public buildings, partly or entirely at their own expense. In this way some of the basilicas in Rome and elsewhere which served as courts of justice and halls of exchange were constructed. The great Basilica Ãmilia, for instance, whose remains may be seen in the Forum to-day, was constructed by an Ãmilius in the second century before our era, and was accepted as a charge by his descendants to be kept in condition and improved at the expense of the Ãmilian family. Under somewhat similar conditions Pompey built the great theatre which bore his name, the first permanent theatre to be built in Rome, and always considered one of the wonders of the city. The cost of this structure was probably covered by the treasure which he brought back from his campaigns in the East. In using the spoils of a successful war to construct buildings or memorials in Rome, he was following the example of Mummius, the conqueror of Corinth, and other great generals who had preceded him. The purely philanthropic motive does not bulk largely in these gifts to the citizens, because the people whose armies had won the victories were part owners at least of the spoils, and because the victorious leader who built the structure was actuated more by the hope of transmitting the memory of his achievements to posterity in some conspicuous and imperishable monument than by a desire to benefit his fellow citizens.
These two motives, the one egoistic and the other altruistic, actuated all the Roman emperors in varying degrees. The activity of Augustus in such matters comes out clearly in the record of his reign, which he has left us in his own words. This remarkable bit of autobiography, known as the “Deeds of the Deified Augustus,” the Emperor had engraved on bronze tablets, placed in front of his mausoleum. The original has disappeared, but fortunately a copy of it has been found on the walls of a ruined temple at Ancyra, in Asia Minor, and furnishes us abundant proof of the great improvements which he made in the city of Rome. We are told in it that from booty he paid for the construction of the Forum of Augustus, which was some four hundred feet long, three hundred wide, and was surrounded by a wall one hundred and twenty feet high, covered on the inside with marble and stucco. Enclosed within it and built with funds coming from the same source was the magnificent temple of Mars the Avenger, which had as its principal trophies the Roman standards recovered from the Parthians. This forum and temple are only two items in the long list of public improvements which Augustus records in his imperial epitaph, for, as he proudly writes: “In my sixth consulship, acting under a decree of the senate, I restored eighty-two temples in the city, neglecting no temple which needed repair at the time.” Besides the temples, he mentions a large number of theatres, porticos, basilicas, aqueducts, roads, and bridges which he built in Rome or in Italy outside the city.
But the Roman people had come to look for acts of generosity from their political as well as from their military leaders, and this factor, too, must be taken into account in the case of Augustus. In the closing years of the Republic, candidates for office and men elected to office saw that one of the most effective ways of winning and holding their popularity was to give public entertainments, and they vied with one another in the costliness of the games and pageants which they gave the people. The well-known case of Cæsar will be recalled, who, during his term as ædile, or commissioner of public works, bankrupted himself by his lavish expenditures on public improvements, and on the games, in which he introduced three hundred and twenty pairs of gladiators for the amusement of the people. In his book, “On the Offices,” Cicero tells us of a thrifty rich man, named Mamercus, who aspired to public office, but avoided taking the ædileship, which stood in the regular sequence of minor offices, in order that he might escape the heavy outlay for public entertainment expected of the ædile. As a consequence, when later he came up for the consulship, the people punished him by defeating him at the polls. To check the growth of these methods of securing votes, Cicero, in his consulship, brought in a corrupt practices act, which forbade citizens to give gladiatorial exhibitions within two years of any election in which they were candidates. We may doubt if this measure was effective. The Roman was as clever as the American politician in accomplishing his purpose without going outside the law. Perhaps an incident in the life of Cicero’s young friend, Curio, is a case in point. It was an old Roman custom to celebrate the ninth day after a burial as a solemn family festival, and some time in the second century before our era the practice grew up of giving gladiatorial contests on these occasions. The versatile Curio, following this practice, testified his respect for his father’s memory by giving the people such elaborate games that he never escaped from the financial difficulties in which they involved him. However, this tribute of pious affection greatly enhanced his popularity, and perhaps did not expose him to the rigors of Cicero’s law.
These gifts from generals, from distinguished citizens, and from candidates for office do not go far to prove a generous or philanthropic spirit on the part of the donors, but they show clearly enough that the practice of giving large sums of money to embellish the city, and to please the public, had grown up under the Republic, and that the people of Rome had come to regard it as the duty of their distinguished fellow citizens to beautify the city and minister to their needs and pleasures by generous private contributions.
All these gifts were for the city of Rome, and for the people of the city, not for the Empire, nor for Italy. This is characteristic of ancient generosity or philanthropy, that its recipients are commonly the people of a single town, usually the donor’s native town. It is one of many indications of the fact that the Roman thought of his city as the state, and even under the Empire he rarely extended the scope of his benefactions beyond the walls of a particular town. The small cities and villages throughout the West reproduced the capital in miniature. Each was a little world in itself. Each of them not only had its forum, its temples, colonnades, baths, theatres, and arenas, but also developed a political and social organization like that of the city of Rome. It had its own local chief magistrates, distinguished by their official robes and insignia of office, and its senators, who enjoyed the privilege of occupying special seats in the theatre, and it was natural that the common people at Ostia, Ariminum, or Lugudunum, like those at Rome, should expect from those whom fortune had favored some return for the distinctions which they enjoyed. In this way the prosperous in each little town came to feel a sense of obligation to their native place, and this feeling of civic pride and responsibility was strengthened by the same spirit of rivalry between different villages that the Italian towns of the Middle Ages seem to have inherited from their ancestors, a spirit of rivalry which made each one eager to surpass the others in its beauty and attractiveness. Perhaps there have never been so many beautiful towns in any other period in history as there were in the Roman Empire, during the second century of our era, and their attractive features–their colonnades, temples, fountains, and works of art–were due in large measure to the generosity of private citizens. We can make this statement with considerable confidence, because these benefactions are recorded for us on innumerable tablets of stone and bronze, scattered throughout the Empire.
These contributions not only helped to meet the cost of building temples, colonnades, and other structures, but they were often intended to cover a part of the running expenses of the city. This is one of the novel features of Roman municipal life. We can understand the motives which would lead a citizen of New York or Boston to build a museum or an arch in his native city. Such a structure would serve as a monument to him; it would give distinction to the city, and it would give him and his fellow citizens æsthetic satisfaction tion But if a rich New Yorker should give a large sum to mend the pavement in Union Square or extend the sewer system on Canal Street, a judicial inquiry into his sanity would not be thought out of place. But the inscriptions show us that rich citizens throughout the Roman Empire frequently made large contributions for just such unromantic purposes. It is unfortunate that a record of the annual income and expenses of some Italian or Gallic town has not come down to us. It would be interesting, for instance, to compare the budget of Mantua or Ancona, in the first century of our era, with that of Princeton or Cambridge in the twentieth. But, although we rarely know the sums which were expended for particular purposes, a mere comparison of the objects for which they were spent is illuminating. The items in the ancient budget which find no place in our own, and vice versa, are significant of certain striking differences between ancient and modern municipal life.
Common to the ancient and the modern city are expenditures for the construction and maintenance of public buildings, sewers, aqueducts, and streets, but with these items the parallelism ends. The ancient objects of expenditure which find no place in the budget of an American town are the repair of the town walls, the maintenance of public worship, the support of the baths, the sale of grain at a low price, and the giving of games and theatrical performances. It is very clear that the ancient legislator made certain provisions for the physical and spiritual welfare of his fellow citizens which find little or no place in our municipal arrangements to-day. If, among the sums spent for the various objects mentioned above, we compare the amounts set apart for religion and for the baths, we may come to the conclusion that the Roman read the old saying, “Cleanliness is next to godliness” in the amended form “Cleanliness is next above godliness.” No city in the Empire seems to have been too small or too poor to possess public baths, and how large an item of annual expense their care was is clear from the fact that an article of the Theodosian code provided that cities should spend at least one-third of their incomes on the heating of the baths and the repair of the walls. The great idle population of the city of Rome had to be provided with food at public expense. Otherwise riot and disorder would have followed, but in the towns the situation was not so threatening, and probably furnishing grain to the people did not constitute a regular item of expense. So far as public entertainments were concerned, the remains of theatres and amphitheatres in Pompeii, Fiesole, Aries, Orange, and at many other places to-day furnish us visible evidence of the large sums which ancient towns must have spent on plays and gladiatorial games. In the city of Rome in the fourth century, there were one hundred and seventy-five days on which performances were given in the theatres, arenas, and amphitheatres.
We have been looking at the items which were peculiar to the ancient budget. Those which are missing from it are still more indicative, if possible, of differences between Roman character and modes of life and those of to-day. Provision was rarely made for schools, museums, libraries, hospitals, almshouses, or for the lighting of streets. No salaries were paid to city officials; no expenditure was made for police or for protection against fire, and the slaves whom every town owned probably took care of the public buildings and kept the streets clean. The failure of the ancient city government to provide for educational and charitable institutions, means, as we shall see later, that in some cases these matters were neglected, that in others they were left to private enterprise. It appears strange that the admirable police and fire system which Augustus introduced into Rome was not adopted throughout the Empire, but that does not seem to have been the case, and life and property must have been exposed to great risks, especially on festival days and in the unlighted streets at night. The rich man could be protected by his bodyguard of clients, and have his way lighted at night by the torches which his slaves carried, but the little shopkeeper must have avoided the dark alleys or attached himself to the retinue of some powerful man. Some of us will recall in this connection the famous wall painting at Pompeii which depicts the riotous contest between the Pompeians and the people of the neighboring town of Nuceria, at the Pompeian gladiatorial games in 50 B.C., when stones were thrown and weapons freely used. What scenes of violence and disorder there must have been on such occasions as these, without systematic police surveillance, can be readily imagined.
The sums of money which an ancient or a modern city spends fall in two categories–the amounts which are paid out for permanent improvements, and the running expenses of the municipality. We have just been looking at the second class of expenditures, and our brief examination of it shows clearly enough that the ancient city took upon its shoulders only a small part of the burden which a modern municipality assumes. It will be interesting now to see how far the municipal outlay for running expenses was supplemented by private generosity, and to find out the extent to which the cities were indebted to the same source for their permanent improvements. A great deal of light is thrown on these two questions by the hundreds of stone and bronze tablets which were set up by donors themselves or by grateful cities to commemorate the gifts made to them. The responsibility which the rich Roman felt to spend his money for the public good was unequivocally stated by the poet Martial in one of his epigrams toward the close of the first century of our era. The speaker in the poem tells his friend Pastor why he is striving to be rich–not that he may have broad estates, rich appointments, fine wines, or troops of slaves, but “that he may give and build for the public good” (“ut donem, Pastor, et ædificem”), and this feeling of stewardship found expression in a steady outpouring of gifts in the interests of the people.
The practice of giving may well have started with the town officials. We have already noticed that in Rome, under the Republic, candidates for office, in seeking votes, and magistrates, in return for the honors paid them, not infrequently spent large sums on the people. In course of time, in the towns throughout the Empire this voluntary practice became a legal obligation resting on local officials. This fact is brought out in the municipal charter of Urso,[95] the modern Osuna, in Spain. Half of this document, engraved on tablets, was discovered in Spain about forty years ago, and makes a very interesting contribution to our knowledge of municipal life. A colony was sent out to Urso, in 44 B.C., by Julius Cæsar, under the care of Mark Antony, and the municipal constitution of the colony was drawn up by one of these two men. In the seventieth article, we read of the duumvirs, who were the chief magistrates: “Whoever shall be duumvirs, with the exception of those who shall have first been elected after the passage of this law, let the aforesaid during their magistracy give a public entertainment or plays in honor of the gods and goddesses Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, for four days, during the greater part of the day, so far as it may be done, at the discretion of the common councillors, and on these games and this entertainment let each one of them spend from his own money not less than two thousand sesterces.” The article which follows in the document provides that the ædiles, or the officials next in rank, shall give gladiatorial games and plays for three days, and one day of races in the circus, and for these entertainments they also must spend not less than two thousand sesterces.
Here we see the modern practice reversed. City officials, instead of receiving a salary for their services, not only serve without pay, but are actually required by law to make a public contribution. It will be noticed that the law specified the minimum sum which a magistrate _must_ spend. The people put no limit on what he _might_ spend, and probably most of the duumvirs of Urso gave more than $80, or, making allowance for the difference in the purchasing value of money, $250, for the entertainment of the people. In fact a great many honorary inscriptions from other towns tell us of officials who made generous additions to the sum required by law. So far as their purpose and results go, these expenditures may be compared with the “campaign contributions” made by candidates for office in this country. There is a strange likeness and unlikeness between the two. The modern politician makes his contribution before the election, the ancient politician after it. In our day the money is expended largely to provide for public meetings where the questions of the day shall be discussed. In Roman times it was spent upon public improvements, and upon plays, dinners, and gladiatorial games. Among us public sentiment is averse to the expenditure of large sums to secure an election. The Romans desired and expected it, and those who were open-handed in this matter took care to have a record of their gifts set down where it could be read by all men.
On general grounds we should expect our system to have a better effect on the intelligence and character of the people, and to secure better officials. The discussion of public questions, even in a partisan way, brings them to the attention of the people, sets the people thinking, and helps to educate voters on political and economic matters. If we may draw an inference from the election posters in Pompeii, such subjects played a small part in a city election under the Empire. It must have been demoralizing, too, to a Pompeian or a citizen of Salona to vote for a candidate, not because he would make the most honest and able duumvir or ædile among the men canvassing for the office, but because he had the longest purse. How our sense of propriety would be shocked if the newly elected mayor of Hartford or Montclair should give a gala performance in the local theatre to his fellow-citizens or pay for a free exhibition by a circus troupe! But perhaps we should overcome our scruples and go, as the people of Pompeii did, and perhaps our consciences would be completely salved if the aforesaid mayor proceeded to lay a new pavement in Main Street, to erect a fountain on the Green, or stucco the city hall. Naturally only rich men could be elected to office in Roman towns, and in this respect the same advantages and disadvantages attach to the Roman system as we find in the practice which the English have followed up to the present time of paying no salary to members of the House of Commons, and in our own practice of letting our ambassadors meet a large part of their legitimate expenses.
The large gifts made to their native towns by rich men elected to public office set an example which private citizens of means followed in an extraordinary way. Sometimes they gave statues, or baths, or fountains, or porticos, and sometimes they provided for games, or plays, or dinners, or lottery tickets. Perhaps nothing can convey to our minds so clear an impression of the motives of the donors, the variety and number of the gifts, and their probable effect on the character of the people as to read two or three specimens of these dedicatory inscriptions. The citizens of Lanuvium, near Rome, set up a monument in honor of a certain Valerius, “because he cleaned out and restored the water courses for a distance of three miles, put the pipes in position again, and restored the two baths for men and the bath for women, all at his own expense.”[96] A citizen of Sinuessa leaves this record: “Lucius Papius Pollio, the duumvir, to his father, Lucius Papius. Cakes and mead to all the citizens of Sinuessa and Cædici; gladiatorial games and a dinner for the people of Sinuessa and the Papian clan; a monument at a cost of 12,000 sesterces.”[97] Such a catholic provision to suit all tastes should certainly have served to keep his father from being forgotten. A citizen of Beneventum lays claim to distinction because “he first scattered tickets among the people by means of which he distributed gold, silver, bronze, linen garments, and other things.”[98] The people of Telesia, a little town in Campania, pay this tribute to their distinguished patron: “To Titus Fabius Severus, patron of the town, for his services at home and abroad, and because he, first of all those who have instituted games, gave at his own expense five wild beasts from Africa, a company of gladiators, and a splendid equipment, the senate and citizens have most gladly granted a statue.”[99] The office of patron was a characteristic Roman institution. Cities and villages elected to this position some distinguished Roman senator or knight, and he looked out for the interests of the community in legal matters and otherwise.
This distinction was held in high esteem, and recipients of it often testified their appreciation by generous gifts to the town which they represented, or were chosen patrons because of their benefactions. This fact is illustrated in the following inscription from Spoletium: “Gaius Torasius Severus, the son of Gaius, of the Horatian tribe, quattuorvir with judicial power, augur, in his own name, and in the name of his son Publius Meclonius Proculus Torasianus, the pontiff, erected (this) on his land (?) and at his own expense. He also gave the people 250,000 sesterces to celebrate his son’s birthday, from the income of which each year, on the third day before the Kalends of September, the members of the Common Council are to dine in public, and each citizen who is present is to receive eight _asses_. He also gave to the seviri Augustales, and to the priests of the Lares, and to the overseers of the city wards, 120,000 sesterces, in order that from the income of this sum they might have a public dinner on the same day. Him, for his services to the community, the senate has chosen patron of the town.”[100] A town commonly showed its appreciation of what had been done for it by setting up a statue in honor of its benefactor, as was done in the case of Fabius Severus, and the public squares of Italian and provincial towns must have been adorned with many works of art of this sort. It amuses one to find at the bottom of some of the commemorative tablets attached to these statues, the statement that the man distinguished in this way, “contented with the honor, has himself defrayed the cost of the monument.” To pay for a popular testimonial to one’s generosity is indeed generosity in its perfect form. The statues themselves have disappeared along with the towns which erected them, but the tablets remain, and by a strange dispensation of fate the monument which a town has set up to perpetuate the memory of one of its citizens is sometimes the only record we have of the town’s own existence.
The motives which actuated the giver were of a mixed character, as these memorials indicate. Sometimes it was desire for the applause of his fellow citizens, or for posthumous fame, which influenced a donor; sometimes civic pride and affection. In many cases it was the compelling force of custom, backed up now and then, as we can see from the inscriptions, by the urgent demands of the populace. Out of this last sentiment there would naturally grow a sense of the obligation imposed by the possession of wealth, and this feeling is closely allied to pure generosity. In fact, it would probably be wrong not to count this among the original motives which actuated men in making their gifts, because the spirit of devotion to the state and to the community was a marked characteristic of Romans in the republican period.
The effects which this practice of giving had on municipal life and on the character of the people are not without importance and interest. The lavish expenditure expected of a magistrate and the ever-increasing financial obligations laid upon him by the central government made municipal offices such an intolerable burden that the charter of Urso of the first century A.D., which has been mentioned above, has to resort to various ingenious devices to compel men to hold them. The position of a member of a town council was still worse. He was not only expected to contribute generously to the embellishment and support of his native city, but he was also held responsible for the collection of the imperial taxes. As prosperity declined he found this an increasingly difficult thing to do, and seats in the local senate were undesirable. The central government could not allow the men responsible for its revenues to escape their responsibility. Consequently, it interposed and forced them to accept the honor. Some of them enlisted in the army, or even fled into the desert, but whenever they were found they were brought back to take up their positions again. In the fourth century, service in the common council was even made a penalty imposed upon criminals. Finally, it became hereditary, and it is an amusing but pathetic thing to find that this honor, so highly prized in the early period, became in the end a form of serfdom.
We have been looking at the effects of private generosity on official life. Its results for the private citizen are not so clear, but it must have contributed to that decline of independence and of personal responsibility which is so marked a feature of the later Empire. The masses contributed little, if anything, to the running expenses of government and the improvement of the city. The burdens fell largely upon the rich. It was a system of quasi-socialism. Those who had, provided for those who had not–not merely markets and temples, and colonnades, and baths, but oil for the baths, games, plays, and gratuities of money. Since their needs were largely met by others, the people lost more and more the habit of providing for themselves and the ability to do so. When prosperity declined, and the wealthy could no more assist them, the end came.
The objects for which donors gave their money seem to prove the essentially materialistic character of Roman civilization, because we must assume that those who gave knew the tastes of the people. Sometimes men like Pliny the Younger gave money for libraries or schools, but such gifts seem to have been relatively infrequent. Benefactions are commonly intended to satisfy the material needs or gratify the desire of the people for pleasure.
Under the old régime charity was unknown. There were neither almshouses nor hospitals, and scholars have called attention to the fact that even the doles of corn which the state gave were granted to citizens only. Mere residents or strangers were left altogether out of consideration, and they were rarely included within the scope of private benevolence. In the following chapter, in discussing the trades-guilds, we shall see that even they made no provision for the widow or orphan, or for their sick or disabled members. It was not until Christianity came that the poor and the needy were helped because of their poverty and need.
Some Reflections on Corporations and Trades-Guilds
In a recent paper on “Ancient and Modern Imperialism,” read before the British Classical Association, Lord Cromer, England’s late consul-general in Egypt, notes certain points of resemblance between the English and the Roman methods of dealing with alien peoples. With the Greeks no such points of contact exist, because, as he remarks, “not only was the imperial idea foreign to the Greek mind; the federal conception was equally strange.” This similarity between the political character and methods of the Romans and Anglo-Saxons strikes any one who reads the history of the two peoples side by side. They show the same genius for government at home, and a like success in conquering and holding foreign lands, and in assimilating alien peoples. Certain qualities which they have in common contribute to these like results. Both the Roman and the Anglo-Saxon have been men of affairs; both have shown great skill in adapting means to an end, and each has driven straight at the immediate object to be accomplished without paying much heed to logic or political theory. A Roman statesman would have said “Amen!” to the Englishman’s pious hope that “his countrymen might never become consistent or logical in politics.” Perhaps the willingness of the average Roman to co-operate with his fellows, and his skill in forming an organization suitable for the purpose in hand, go farther than any of the other qualities mentioned above to account for his success in governing other peoples as well as his own nation.
Our recognition of these striking points of resemblance between the Romans and ourselves has come from a comparative study of the political life of the two peoples. But the likeness to each other of the Romans and Anglo-Saxons, especially in the matter of associating themselves together for a common object, is still more apparent in their methods of dealing with private affairs. A characteristic and amusing illustration of the working of this tendency among the Romans is furnished by the early history of monasticism in the Roman world. When the Oriental Christian had convinced himself of the vanity of the world, he said: “It is the weakness of the flesh and the enticements of the wicked which tempt me to sin. Therefore I will withdraw from the world and mortify the flesh.” This is the spirit which drove him into the desert or the mountains, to live in a cave with a lion or a wolf for his sole companion. This is the spirit which took St. Anthony into a solitary place in Egypt. It led St. Simeon Stylites to secure a more perfect sense of aloofness from the world, and a greater security from contact with it by spending the last thirty years of his life on the top of a pillar near Antioch. In the Western world, which was thoroughly imbued with the Roman spirit, the Christian who held the same view as his Eastern brother of the evil results flowing from intercourse with his fellow men, also withdrew from the world, but he withdrew in the company of a group of men who shared his opinions on the efficacy of a life of solitude. A delightful instance of the triumph of the principle of association over logic or theory! We Americans can understand perfectly the compelling force of the principle, even in such a