V.

Life in Imperial Rome

The conquests of the empire gradually transformed the nature of Roman society. A principal reason for this transformation was that the very idea of “Roman” had changed as Rome’s leaders extended citizenship to all Italians and to millions of provincials. It is hard to generalize about Roman society during the Roman Empire because the Roman population had become so diverse. People who valued Rome’s traditions were not at all happy to discover that they shared their city with Easterners who spoke different languages and observed different customs. Others recognized that provincials brought different blood and a new vitality to Roman society that allowed it to survive for centuries.

A.

Social Order

Rome was a highly hierarchical society in which different classes or groups had well-defined roles. Historical sources provide far more information about the elite or wealthy people than the poor. Writers of the day generally ignored the stories of those who made up the lower class. Modern historians and archaeologists have tried to reconstruct the lives of ordinary Romans from a variety of sources: occasional references in poems and histories, tombstone inscriptions, and everyday objects that survive from antiquity or that are uncovered in excavations at sites like the ancient cities of Pompeii and Ostia.

A.1.

Elites

In Rome the imperial court was the center of aristocratic life with senators, equestrians, and assorted others—like actors and astrologers—eager to impress the emperor and his family. The emperors used ties of patronage, rewarding elites who were loyal with offices and gifts. Senators, equestrians, and other wealthy courtiers had their own dependents who relied on their generosity.

The Roman elite had wealth, official position, and prestige. They did not have to work, except to manage their estates. Consequently, they often did public service. They owned large townhouses as well as villas in the countryside. They often held elegant banquets at their homes and served wild game and fish from specially stocked ponds. Aristocrats not only lived better than the poor, but they received privileged treatment from the imperial officials and the courts. Members of the elite could not be tortured or summarily punished, and if they were accused of a crime, the emperor could hear their cases. Even if they were convicted of a capital offense, these men and women could not be crucified, burned alive, or thrown to the beasts, which were the punishments faced by the lower classes. Aristocrats were executed only by the sword.

In other cities of the empire, local elites also assumed the traditional responsibilities of holding office, sponsoring games, erecting public buildings, and making charitable contributions. The groups who commanded special respect often varied from place to place. Local aristocratic families, individuals who inherited local priesthoods, or Roman settlers could hold the highest position on the social ladder in different cities, but invariably a hierarchical structure existed.

A.2.

Lower Classes

The lower classes included poor citizens, noncitizens, slaves, and former slaves called freedmen. The working masses who toiled with their hands in the fields and towns represented the largest segment of the population during the empire, but not all of the lower classes were manual laborers. Doctors, musicians, actors, teachers, and even philosophers fell into the lower classes, as did craftspeople.

Institutions called collegia, which were similar to fraternal lodges in modern society, provided the poor with an alternative community. Some were trade groups or guilds of craftspeople, but most were burial societies that enabled each member to receive a proper funeral. The societies, open to freedmen and slaves alike, had their own officials. Each collegium sought a wealthy patron to contribute to celebratory banquets at religious festivals as well as to provide some legal protection for the members who, in turn, gave respect and prayers to the patron. In a small city, people had opportunities for enrichment that did not exist in the countryside. People could improve their status in the hierarchy by serving in the army or by being successful in trade.

A.2.a.

Slaves

When the Romans conquered the Mediterranean, they took millions of slaves to Italy, where they toiled on the large plantations or in the houses and workplaces of wealthy citizens. The Italian economy depended on abundant slave labor, with slaves constituting 40 percent of the population. Enslaved people with talent, skill, or beauty commanded the highest prices, and many served as singers, scribes, jewelers, bartenders, and even doctors. One slave trained in medicine was worth the price of 50 agricultural slaves.

Roman law was inconsistent on slavery. Slaves were considered property; they had no rights and were subject to their owners’ whims. However, they had legal standing as witnesses in courtroom proceedings, and they could eventually gain freedom and citizenship. Masters often freed loyal slaves in gratitude for their faithful service, but slaves could also save money to purchase their freedom. Conditions for slaves in Rome gradually improved, although slaves were treated cruelly in the countryside. Some harsh masters believed in the old proverb “Every slave is an enemy,” so that while humane legislation prohibited the mutilation or murder of slaves, outrageous cruelty continued. Like the Stoic philosophers, Christians taught the brotherhood of humanity and urged kindness towards slaves, but they did not consider slaves equals in status. For example, Saint Augustine opposed the principle of slavery, but did not see how the practice could be abolished without endangering the social order. Thus he regarded it as another necessary evil resulting from humanity’s fall from divine grace. Other bishops were less troubled, and the early Christian church actually acquired its own slaves.

Slavery in the Roman Empire did not suddenly end, but it was slowly replaced when new economic forces introduced other forms of cheap labor. During the late empire, Roman farmers and traders were reluctant to pay large amounts of money for slaves because they did not wish to invest in a declining economy. The legal status of “slave” continued for centuries, but slaves were gradually replaced by wage laborers in the towns and by land-bound peasants (later called serfs) in the countryside. These types of workers provided cheap labor without the initial cost that slave owners had to pay for slaves. Slavery did not disappear in Rome because of human reform or religious principle, but because the Romans found another, perhaps even harsher, system of labor.

A.2.b.

Freedmen

The class of people known as freedmen consisted of former slaves who had gained their freedom. Masters became patrons to their freed slaves, who owed them respect and often performed specific duties for them. For example, former slaves often worked for their patrons, selling the produce of the estate. Some imperial freedmen became enormously wealthy; one freedman possessed 4,000 slaves of his own. Freedmen had limited political rights, but they could direct their ambitions to their sons. Roman freedmen did not encounter the racial prejudice that restricted the political and economic progress of the descendants of American slaves. In a single generation, a family might move from slavery to social prominence. In ad 193 Publius Helvius Pertinax, the son of a former slave, became emperor.

A.3.

Women

Men wrote nearly all the books during the Roman Empire, so they provide most of the views of women. Most of these ancient sources focus on empresses, princesses, and other aristocratic women and do not shed much light on the condition of ordinary Roman women. Only a few letters and poems actually written by Roman women survive.

Roman aristocratic women influenced politics, but they could not serve as magistrates, senators, or military commanders. During the empire, the wives of emperors began to wield more power than women had ever held before. Livia, the wife of Augustus, advised her husband for 51 years of marriage before living her last 15 years under the rule of her son, Tiberius. She was deeply devoted to her husband and family and only appeared in public to display the virtues of a Roman matron, which included chastity, modesty, frugality, loyalty, and dignity. Behind the scenes, Livia and Augustus were extremely close, and she played a part in his important decisions, although some sources unfairly portray her as the evil, manipulative power behind the throne. Roman society accepted senatorial advisors, but invariably regarded women close to power as grasping and devious.

Only archaeology provides much material about the lives of lower-class Roman women. Stone carvings and funeral inscriptions show that women worked as nurses, waitresses, midwives, weavers, and food sellers. Women performed other jobs such as jewelry making, leather working, and ceramics alongside their husbands in family businesses, but this type of work was rarely recorded. The brief texts and crude images of working women do not provide much detail about their lives, although there is a similar lack of information about lower-class men.

Romans traditionally depicted the ideal woman as a virtuous daughter, brave wife, or devoted mother. Some women were cast into heroic roles in reaction to political persecution; they hid their families, or even followed banished husbands or children into exile. Like men, upper-class women also won praise through public generosity; they built public monuments and temples, subsidized games, and became patrons of their home cities. As a sign of their rank, aristocratic women were given seats with the senators at public games, where they could display fine clothing and jewelry.

Women had long played an important role in Roman religion. Vestal virgins, who were priestesses of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth, kept the sacred fire burning at Vesta’s temple in the Roman Forum. They lived in an elaborate house near the temple and occupied a place of honor at public ceremonies. Some festivals and rites were reserved for women, but these ceremonies were usually private.

It is more difficult to assess how women were involved in cultural and intellectual life. Upper-class girls went to elementary school and often learned to read and write. Generally they were not permitted to pursue higher study with men of learning, although Stoic philosophers were sympathetic to women’s education. Even without higher education, Nero’s mother, known as Agrippina the Younger, wrote a biography of her mother. The empress Julia Domna, wife of emperor Lucius Septimius Severus (193-211), was a patron of learning and served as the primary advisor of her son, Caracalla (211-217), throughout much of his reign as emperor.

Roman society had long valued boys above girls. Poor families sometimes abandoned infant daughters in the countryside to avoid paying dowries, the gifts traditionally given by a girl’s parents to her husband’s family. The practice of allowing baby girls to die, called female infanticide, continued down to the Christian era and had an impact on the size of the female population. Childbearing was dangerous. Tombstones show that the life expectancy of women was 34 years as contrasted with 46 years for men because women often died in childbirth.

Some male writers attacked imperial women’s education, political power, and sexuality. Roman women did have one kind of real power—the wealth that came from their right to own and inherit property. Despite this wealth and prestige, no Roman woman actually ruled the empire in her own name, although some other countries did have women rulers: Egyptian queen Cleopatra, Queen Boudicca of the Britons, and Zenobia, who reigned over Palmyra in Syria. In Rome, men held political power and women could only exercise indirect power.

B.

Government

As the empire developed, the emperor stood at the top of the administrative system. He served as military commander in chief, high priest, court of appeal, and source of law. All this power was intensely personal: Soldiers swore their oath to the emperor, not to a constitution or a flag. Personal ties of patronage, friendship, and marriage had always bound together Roman society, but during the empire the emperor became the universal patron. Military loyalty, bureaucracy, and imperial succession were all viewed in personal terms. This concentration of power produced a court in which government officials and the imperial family competed with poets, astrologers, doctors, slaves, and actors for the emperor’s attention and favor. The emperor’s own slaves and freedmen dominated the clerical and financial posts and formed the core of imperial administration just as they did in the household administration of any Roman aristocrat. Deep ties of loyalty bound Roman freedmen and slaves to their patrons so that they faithfully served even the most monstrous emperors.

B.1.

Political Offices

The emperors took over the Senate’s political and legislative power, but they needed the help of senators who had experience in diplomacy, government, and military command. Since the emperor designated candidates for all government positions, senators had no other access to high office except through loyal service. A shrewd emperor could turn senatorial pride and loyalty to the advantage of the empire. By simply allowing senators to wear a broad purple stripe on their togas, for example, the emperor marked them as rulers of the Mediterranean and added to their prestige.

Only when emperors treated senators with contempt did the senators feel justified in conspiring against the emperor under the banner of freedom. Some ambitious senators dreamed of reaching supreme power and even of replacing the emperor. An occasional opportunity presented itself—Nero’s death brought four senators to the imperial throne in the single year of ad 69. However, most senators remained loyal to the emperor because the constant danger of displeasing suspicious emperors outweighed the remote chance of success. As the old noble families died out, the emperors found new blood among the local elite of Italy and the provinces. In the 2nd century ad more than half the senators were of provincial origin.

The emperor Augustus had first given the equestrian order increased responsibilities, and they continued to play an important role in the governance of the empire. Only a few of the equites actually worked for the emperor, some served as officers of Rome’s auxiliary forces, and others as civil administrators. Most members of this order remained in their home cities—there were 500 in the Spanish seaport of Cádiz alone—and formed the basis of a loyal elite that characterized the early empire. As the government expanded, the “equestrian career” began to resemble a modern civil service with ranks, promotions, and a salary scale. While retired centurions occasionally advanced into the equestrian order and equestrians into the Senate, social mobility remained limited. The emperors tried to keep the equestrians loyal by permitting them signs of privilege similar to senators. Tens of thousands of equestrians across the empire marked their status by wearing togas with a narrow purple stripe and sitting in the front row at public games.

Senators and equestrians whom the emperor appointed as governors, generals, and prefects held substantial power in the provinces, although provincial administration was initially restricted to issues of taxation and law and order. The system grew increasingly complex, but it always remained rather small for such an expansive empire. Twelfth-century China had an elite government official for every 15,000 subjects, as compared to Rome, which had one for every 400,000 people in the empire. Such figures are crude, but they show that Roman administration was less intrusive than its counterparts in China and many other modern states. The empire, with its limited administrative system, could not have functioned without local officials in the provinces or subject kings appointed by Rome, like Herod the Great in Judea.

B.2.

Roman Law

Historians often focus on political leaders, but it is local grievances about high taxes, crime, or the price of bread that most often provoke people to revolt against a government. The Romans relied on civil laws to address a variety of these issues. Roman law in the republic was often based on custom. During the Roman Empire, however, the emperor became the final source of law. People in the provinces were well aware that the emperor sat atop the chain of command as recorded in the New Testament to the Bible. In regard to taxation, for example, a passage in Luke 2:1 notes: “And it came to pass in those days, that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus, that the whole world should be enrolled to be taxed.” However, popular anger over issues such as taxation was still directed toward the political officeholders who administered the laws.

Roman law was one of the most original products of the Roman mind. From the Law of the Twelve Tables, the first Roman code of law developed during the early republic, the Roman legal system was characterized by a formalism that lasted for more than 1,000 years. The basis for Roman law was the idea that the exact form, not the intention, of words or of actions produced legal consequences. To ignore intention may not seem fair from a modern perspective, but the Romans recognized that there are witnesses to actions and words, but not to intentions.

Roman civil law allowed great flexibility in adopting new ideas or extending legal principles in the complex environment of the empire. Without replacing older laws, the Romans developed alternative procedures that allowed greater fairness. For example, a Roman was entitled by law to make a will as he wished, but, if he did not leave his children at least 25 percent of his property, the magistrate would grant them an action to have the will declared invalid as an 'irresponsible testament.' Instead of simply changing the law to avoid confusion, the Romans preferred to humanize a rigid system by flexible adaptation.

Early Roman law derived from custom and statutes, but the emperor asserted his authority as the ultimate source of law. His edicts, judgments, administrative instructions, and responses to petitions were all collected with the comments of legal scholars. As one 3rd-century jurist said, 'What pleases the emperor has the force of law.' As the law and scholarly commentaries on it expanded, the need grew to codify and to regularize conflicting opinions. It was not until much later in the 6th century ad that the emperor Justinian I, who ruled over the Byzantine Empire in the east, began to publish a comprehensive code of laws, collectively known as the Corpus Juris Civilis, but more familiarly as the Justinian Code.

C.

Urban Life

Ancient Rome was situated on seven hills and its monumental public buildings—the Colosseum, the Forum of Trajan, and the Pantheon—made the city the “capital of the world” under the emperors. But in addition to the arenas, temples, and forums, Rome also had theaters, basilicas, gymnasiums, baths, taverns, and brothels. The first emperor, Augustus, had a modest house, but his successors progressively expanded it into an enormous imperial residence on the Palatine Hill from which all “palaces” take their name. The rich preferred to live on the hills above the teeming crowds and animals of central Rome. Rome housed over 1 million inhabitants, so most of its buildings were not villas and splendid monuments. The poor lived packed into apartment houses near the center of the city since there was no public transport. The public spaces in Rome resounded with such a din of hooves and clatter of iron chariot wheels that Julius Caesar proposed a ban on chariot traffic at night.

One Roman writer said that the imperial government kept the Romans contented by “bread and circuses.” Other societies have relied on the same strategy, but never to the same degree. The Roman emperors provided free food to hundreds of thousands and sponsored an endless series of games. For two centuries the government managed to avoid food shortages or the discontent that would endanger the rule of the emperors.

The government gave high priority to acquiring, shipping, storing, and distributing food for Rome and other major urban areas. The Romans had a formidable logistical task to supply Rome’s 1 million inhabitants. The emperors organized convoys from Egypt, North Africa, and Sicily to carry food to urban areas. They generously distributed wheat, which was the staple food of the time. When the emperors improved facilities at Rome’s seaport, Ostia, for example, they wanted to ensure a steady supply of wheat to the capital. Italian farms provided fruit and vegetables, but meat and fish were luxuries in an urban society. The Romans built huge waterways called aqueducts to bring water to the cities and imported large jugs of wine and oil from Spain, Gaul, and Africa to fulfill the necessities of the Roman table.

The emperors used different forms of entertainment to pacify the urban masses, including chariot races, theatrical and musical performances, wild-beast hunts, mock sea battles, public executions, and gladiatorial combat. In the Colosseum, Rome’s huge amphitheater, 50,000 Romans could watch the games. Criminals and captives were sent to gladiatorial training schools so that they learned to entertain the crowds. If gladiators successfully performed in combat, they might earn the support of the crowd and an imperial “thumbs-up,” meaning a reprieve and freedom. The crowd could also determine whether the fate of the battle’s loser was death. The games were important occasions during which the Roman people could see the emperor, and he could show his respect for them by following their desire to spare a gladiator.

The emperor Titus opened the Colosseum in ad 80 with 100 days of games in which 9,000 animals died. The crowds came to the games to see fighting and blood as well as the color and pageantry of public celebrations. The most popular events were the chariot races held in the Circus Maximus, an arena that held up to 300,000 spectators. Competing teams with brightly decorated horses attracted fierce loyalty, and up to a dozen four-horse chariots crowded together through the dangerous turns, lap after lap. Successful charioteers became so wealthy that even emperors envied their riches.

Historians estimate that about 10 percent of the empire’s population lived in the thousand cities that stretched from Britain to Syria: Colchester and London in Britain, Lyon and Arles in Gaul, Timgad and Lepcis Magna in North Africa, to the great eastern cities of Antioch in ancient Syria and Alexandria in Egypt. Most of these cities were rather small, with fewer than 10,000 residents, and only a handful had more than 100,000 inhabitants. Most of the larger urban populations were in the East, but new cities developed in the western provinces as an outgrowth of military settlement and trade. All of these urban centers had a forum and temples, and most also had the same kind of public buildings found in Rome, but on a smaller scale.

Rome administered a vast empire with a small civil service, so the burden of effective government rested on the local elite. Some conquered Greek cities retained their traditional form of government, but many in the western portion of the empire established a municipal council called a curia, named after the Roman Senate. The city council and annually elected officials administered the food supply, public services, religious festivities, town finance, and local building projects. The Romans thus created in these outlying cities a provincial aristocracy modeled on Rome’s social system. The imperial government expected local authorities to maintain order by the same social and cultural methods used by Rome. Because of these methods, Roman municipal governments rarely had to dispatch legions to quiet social unrest or rebellion.

Local elites often used their own resources to subsidize public buildings, games, and even the distribution of grain to the poor. They were willing to carry the burden of municipal expenses because they had a strong sense of civic responsibility and a desire to show off their economic success. However, when the empire later declined economically, city officials increasingly avoided their public duties, undermining the entire system of local government. Without the local elite to maintain order and collect taxes, the empire became ungovernable.

In the latter part of the 1st century ad, a recession hit Italy particularly hard. For instance, a case of Italian-style pottery made in Gaul and found unopened at Pompeii shows that Italy was competing with the provinces. An influx of gold from Dacia (present-day Romania) during the reign of the emperor Trajan temporarily reversed the decline of the Italian economy, but prosperity could not last forever. Frontier troubles increased the cost of the army, and the bureaucracy continued its inevitable growth. The empire was no longer expanding, and rising costs far outstripped the limited economic growth possible in a preindustrial economy. By ad 160 economic decline began to imperil the Roman peace that the emperors had worked so hard to maintain.

D.

Rural Life

The cities of the empire had large populations and impressive public buildings, but 90 percent of the emperor’s subjects worked in the countryside and lived in flimsy agricultural huts. Land was the only secure investment, so the wealthy owned estates and idealized the peaceful life of the countryside. Yet these same people actually lived in the cities and had a much less romantic view of real peasants. During the empire all written accounts of the countryside, whether sympathetic or hostile, came from the sophisticated urban elite who performed no manual labor.

Since landlords usually resided in cities, estate overseers made life in the countryside very harsh. Agricultural slaves were treated far worse than their urban counterparts who worked in aristocratic households. The conditions in Egypt were particularly bad. Rome inherited the dictatorial system of the Egyptian monarchs, the pharaohs, who ordered the production of huge wheat crops at terrible human cost. Ancient sources indicate that as many as 42 people occupied one small farm hut in Egypt, while six families owned a single olive tree. Local villagers lived in crushing poverty and had none of the diversions of the city like games, religious festivals, or free distribution of food. Not surprisingly, many peasants drifted to the cities, and the countryside became depopulated. Emperors initially encouraged small farmers to remain on the land by providing loans, but later used the brutal practices of Egypt to bind the peasants to the soil, foreshadowing a similar practice of forced labor during medieval times.

E.

Transportation and Technology

From earliest times the Romans displayed remarkable skill at building and engineering. They constructed bridges across the river Tiber, aqueducts to supply Rome with water, and sewers to drain the Forum and keep the city healthy. As they expanded their power across Italy, the Romans linked the capital with other communities they had conquered by a network of roads so well designed that many still lie beneath the motorways of modern Italy.

After the neglect of the provinces during the civil wars, Augustus was determined to improve the infrastructure to promote economic growth. During the first two centuries ad, war was relatively infrequent, and Augustus and his successors kept their troops busy with military construction. A great network of roads, bridges, and canals opened the interior of Gaul to Roman commerce and cultural influence. Rome’s military engineers were skilled surveyors who designed numerous vast projects in the provinces that the troops helped to build: fortified camps, frontier walls, roads, canals, bridges, arches, baths, and temples. These projects and other legionary expenditures helped the provincial economies by providing work for local merchants, craftspeople, farmers, and the usual range of camp followers.

E.1.

Aqueducts

The Romans built hundreds of miles of aqueducts that provided the population with a generous supply of fresh water, including more than 200 million gallons a day for the city of Rome. The city provided public baths, toilets, and more than a thousand public fountains—even for the poor—while direct pipelines served the villas of the wealthy. Sewers and organized garbage collections made imperial Rome much healthier than other cities of antiquity. But Augustus not only repaired the aqueducts of the capital, he constructed Italian and provincial aqueducts to bring water to such cities as Nîmes in Gaul, Antioch in Syria, and Ephesus in Asia Minor.

E.2.

Buildings

The emperor Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. The Romans had earlier imported marble from Greece, but newly discovered quarries in northern Italy gave the emperor an abundance of gleaming white stone. His sculptors and architects observed Greek models and then borrowed elements to develop their own Roman-style buildings. As the empire grew, it required extensive new public construction. When the old Roman Forum could no longer cope with the commercial and political demands of the growing city, for example, Augustus constructed the adjoining Forum of Augustus and decorated it with sculpture and inscriptions honoring great Romans of the past. Architects used Greek columns, but adapted them to enhance a distinctly Roman architectural setting.

In the 1st century ad the Romans made greater use of concrete. Roman architects molded arches, vaults, and even domes from concrete, faced with bricks for added strength and decorated with an exterior layer of marble or stucco. After Nero’s death, his successor, Vespasian, constructed a great amphitheater on the ruins of Nero’s official residence as a palace for the masses. The building, called the Colosseum, took its name from the 120-foot colossus, or statue, of Nero as a sun god. Concrete enabled the architects of the great amphitheater to build tunnels that allowed easy access for spectators. This feature is still included in the design of modern football stadiums.

The use of concrete also allowed the Romans to enclose larger spaces for their baths and other rectangular structures called basilicas. Emperors from Augustus to Constantine built new forums or added basilicas to existing forums to provide space for the public and private business of a growing empire. During his reign, Trajan (ad 98-117) constructed vast markets for distributing food. The vaulted hall in the Forum of Trajan continues today as a site for special exhibitions. The Romans built to last. The greatest tribute to Roman engineering is that so many buildings, roads, bridges, and aqueducts remain in use after 2,000 years.

The Romans also built some strikingly beautiful structures that have influenced architecture throughout the centuries. Hadrian probably designed the temple that he erected between ad 118 and 128. This magnificent building was called the Pantheon because it was dedicated to “all the gods.” It is considered by many to be the greatest of all Roman temples. Its consecration as a church in the early 7th century allowed it to survive intact, though the external marble facing is now gone. The bare brick exterior gives no sense of the interior space capped by a large dome, which later became an important feature in Byzantine, Islamic, and Renaissance architecture. The center of the dome is pierced with a 27-foot-wide opening called an oculus that floods the building’s interior with natural light.

Roman public buildings were usually decorated with elaborate relief sculpture that often introduced divine elements into specific historical scenes. In the Altar of Augustan Peace, now reconstructed beside the Tiber River, scenes of Roman gods and mythic characters such as Mars, Venus, and Aeneas accompany a procession of the entire imperial family. Greek workers carved these sculptures, but the themes of myth, family, fertility, and religious devotion are purely Roman.

The most elaborate Roman historical relief is the 700-foot frieze that winds around the ten-story Trajan’s Column. Military architects drew detailed pictures of Trajan's conquest of Dacia, which sculptors in Rome recreated in marble. The 2,500 figures in the frieze are extraordinarily exact, and excavations have also confirmed the accuracy of barbarian costumes and buildings. The armies are shown fighting battles, building camps, and besieging cities, while the emperor encourages his troops. Several divine figures also appear in this otherwise realistic depiction: The river Danube, portrayed as a person, stares at the ships, and Victory brings a storm to save the Romans from defeat. Trajan's Column still stands in Rome, topped by a statue of Saint Peter where the original image of Trajan once stood.

F.

Literature

During the reign of Augustus many commentators proclaimed the arrival of a new Golden Age as Romans returned to traditional values. These values included religion, family, and an appreciation of the Italian countryside and its agrarian roots. Writers and artists from all parts of Italy came to Rome, where generous patronage helped to encourage extraordinary achievements. The Augustan peace and the prosperity that accompanied it brought about the revival of patriotic literature that hailed the triumphs of Rome, its people, and its new leader.

Livy, who was born in the city of Padua in 59 bc, wrote a history of Rome that spanned the period from mythic times to his own day. An artist more than a scholar, Livy was a marvelous storyteller. His stirring accounts of Rome’s early struggle for freedom inspired painters, poets, and political leaders through the centuries, even though only a quarter of his enormous work has survived.

Augustus gave the southern Italian poet Horace sufficient property to allow him the leisure to write. Horace’s most famous poetic works, the Odes (23 bc), often drew on Greek verse in praising love, wine, and the simple life of the countryside. He turned common ideas into great lyric poetry by expressing them with exquisite form and verbal elegance. Horace believed that the Roman people and his own work were eternal. “I will not entirely die,” he aptly wrote, “since my poetry will be a monument more lasting than bronze.”

Virgil, the greatest of all Roman poets, modeled his masterpiece, the Aeneid (30-19 bc), on the ancient Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey, written by Homer. Virgil’s work also portrayed the battles that the hero of Roman mythology, Aeneas, fought at Troy and his search for an Italian homeland. Aeneas sacrificed love and human compassion in the name of duty and conquest, and the poet portrayed the power of destiny and the poignancy of loss. Virgil had not completed the poem when he died in 19 bc, and Augustus personally overruled the poet’s dying request that the manuscript be burned. Christians during the Middle Ages regarded the Aeneid as the greatest work of pagan antiquity.

Not every Augustan poet developed such grand or serious themes. Sextus Propertius was an ardent poet of love and sexual passion who politely avoided war and politics. Love was above all a game for the more refined and disdainful Roman poet Ovid. His work Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) was a handbook of sex and seduction for both men and women. Ovid’s masterpiece, the Metamorphoses, was a poem in which he turns his sophisticated wit to a series of tales from Greek mythology. Late in the reign of Augustus, Ovid was involved in some mysterious scandal, perhaps involving a poem about the emperor’s daughter Julia, and was banished to a small Roman outpost on the Black Sea. The emperor never forgave Ovid, who died in exile.

The writers of the 1st century ad believed that Roman literature had declined since the Golden Age under Augustus. These authors became part of an era often referred to as the Silver Age, although some of them outshone their predecessors. The philosopher Seneca wrote highly acclaimed essays and moral letters. He also served as the tutor of Nero, but later, when the unpopular emperor suspected that Seneca was involved in a conspiracy against him, Seneca was forced to commit suicide. Another writer at Nero’s court, Petronius Arbiter, left a fragmentary novel, Satyricon, which portrayed the excesses of life in Rome of the 1st century ad. Petronius presented a portrait of conspicuous consumption in his description of the vulgar banquet of the wealthy freedman Trimalchio. Petronius was also ordered to commit suicide, but he remained clever to the end by giving a festive farewell party for his friends to displease Nero.

Three other great Latin writers wrote at the beginning of the 2nd century. The satirist Juvenal was a social critic who used his wit to expose vulgarity. He directed his humorous barbs at women, homosexuals, foreigners, aristocrats, and, in one of his most famous poems, pilloried the vanity of all human wishes.

Suetonius also used humor in his writings, although he was primarily a biographer. His work called the Lives of the Twelve Caesars (121?) is the most colorful historical source that has survived from the ancient world. Suetonius served as imperial librarian under Hadrian, a position that gave him unrivaled access to the official archives. He often incorporated personal or vulgar details in his writings, including, for example, the story that Caligula was so touchy about his premature baldness that no one was allowed to look down on him from above. Suetonius was often crude as well as funny, but he provided an intimate portrayal of the age found in no other source.

The most notable characteristics of Rome’s Silver Age—rhetorical skill, biting wit, and a bleak vision—are found in the writings of the historian Cornelius Tacitus. Many consider his Annales (Annals, 115?-117?) the greatest history written in Latin. This work covered the Julian emperors from Tiberius to Nero and exposed how the rulers and the ruled collaborated in their mutual corruption. His clear-eyed appraisal of the dark side of human nature made Tacitus one of the great political pessimists in the Western tradition. The Annales is not a work of dry political analysis, but is filled with dramatic encounters, irreverent or black humor, and compelling psychological portraits of tyrants like Tiberius.