LET us enter these dwellings, temples, theaters, and baths, and see how these Romans lived; we shall find them more interesting than their art. We must at the outset recall that by Nero’s time they were only geographically Roman. The conditions that Augustus had failed to check—celibacy, childlessness, abortion, and infanticide among the older stocks, manumission and comparative fertility among the new—had transformed the racial character, the moral temper, even the physiognomy, of the Roman people.
Once the Romans had been precipitated into parentage by the impetus of sex, and lured to it by anxiety for the post-mortem care of their graves; now the upper and middle classes had learned to separate sex from parentage, and were skeptical about the afterworld. Once the rearing of children had been an obligation of honor to the state, enforced by public opinion; now it seemed absurd to demand more births in a city crowded to the point of redolence. On the contrary, wealthy bachelors and childless husbands continued to be courted by sycophants longing for legacies. “Nothing,” said Juvenal, “will so endear you to your friends as a barren wife.”1 “Crotona,” says a character in Petronius, “has only two classes of inhabitants—flatterers and flattered; and the sole crime there is to bring up children to inherit your money. It is like a battlefield at rest: nothing but corpses and the crows that pick them.”2 Seneca consoled a mother who had lost her only child by reminding her how popular she would now be; for “with us childlessness gives more power than it takes away.”3 The Gracchi had been a family of twelve children; probably not five families of such abundance could be found in Nero’s age in patrician or equestrian Rome. Marriage, which had once been a lifelong economic union, was now among a hundred thousand Romans a passing adventure of no great spiritual significance, a loose contract for the mutual provision of physiological conveniences or political aid. To escape the testatory disabilities of the unmarried some women took eunuchs as contraceptive husbands;4 some entered into sham wedlock with poor men on the understanding that the wife need bear no children and might have as many lovers as she pleased.5 Contraception was practiced in both its mechanical and chemical forms.6 If these methods failed there were many ways of procuring abortion. Philosophers and the law condemned it, but the finest families practiced it. “Poor women,” says Juvenal, “endure the perils of childbirth, and all the troubles of nursing . . . but how often does a gilded bed harbor a pregnant woman? So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist!” Nevertheless, he tells the husband, “rejoice; give her the potion . . . for were she to bear the child you might find yourself the father of an Ethiopian.”7 In so enlightened a society infanticide was rare.I
The infertility of the moneyed classes was so offset by immigration and the fecundity of the poor that the population of Rome and the Empire continued to grow. Beloch estimated it at 800,000 for the Rome of the early Empire, Gibbon at 1,200,000, Marquardt at 1,600,000.II Beloch computed the population of the Empire at 54,000,000, Gibbon at 120,000,000.11 The aristocracy was as numerous as before, but it was almost wholly altered in origin. We hear no more of the Aemilii, Claudii, Fabii, Valerii; only the Cornelii remained of the proud clans that, as late as Caesar, had strutted their Rome. Some had vanished through war or political execution; others had faded out through family limitation, physiological degeneration, or an impoverishment that had lowered them into the plebeian mass. Their places had been taken by Roman businessmen, Italian municipal dignitaries, and provincial nobles. In A.D. 56 a senator declared that “most of the knights, and many of the senators, were descendants of slaves.”12 After a generation or two the new optimates adopted the ways of their predecessors, had fewer children and more luxuries, and surrendered to inundation from the East.
First had come the Greeks—not so much from the mainland as from Cyrenaica, Egypt, Syria, and Asia Minor. They were eager, clever, facile semi-Orientals; many of them small traders or import merchants; some of them scientists, writers, teachers, artists, physicians, musicians, actors; some sincerely, some venally, devoted to philosophy; some of them able administrators and financiers, many of them without moral scruple, nearly all without religious belief. The majority had come as slaves and were not an ideal selection; freed, they kept their external servility, their internal hatred and scorn of the rich Roman who lived intellectually on the cultural leavings of ancient Hellas. The streets of the capital were now noisy with restless and voluble Greeks; the Greek language was more often heard there than the Latin; if one wished to be read by all classes he had to write in Greek. Nearly all the early Christians in Rome spoke Greek; so did the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Jews. A large colony of Egyptians—traders, artisans, artists—lived in the Field of Mars. Syrians, thin, affable, shrewd, were everywhere in the capital, busy with trade, handicrafts, secretarial work, finance, and chicanery.
The Jews were already in Caesar’s time a substantial element in the population of the capital. A few had come as early as 140 B.C..;13 many had been brought to Rome as war captives after Pompey’s campaign of 63 B.C. They were rapidly emancipated, partly by their industry and thrift, partly because their strict adherence to their religious customs was inconvenient for their masters. By 59 B.C. there were so many Jewish citizens in the assemblies that Cicero represented opposition to them as political temerity.14 In general the republican party was hostile to the Jews, the populares and the emperors were friendly.15 III By the end of the first century they numbered some 20,000 in the capital.18 They lived mostly on the west side of the Tiber, where they suffered periodically from the floods. They worked on the near-by docks, engaged in handicrafts and retail business, and peddled goods through the city. There were some rich men among them, but only a few great merchants; Syrians and Greeks dominated international commerce. Synagogues were numerous in Rome, and each had its school, its scribes, and its gerousia, or senate of elders.19 The separatism of the Jews, their scorn of polytheism and image worship, the severity of their morals, their refusal to attend the theaters or the games, their strange customs and ceremonies, their poverty and resultant uncleanliness, led to the usual racial antagonisms. Juvenal denounced their fertility, Tacitus their monotheism, Ammianus Marcellinus their fondness for garlic.20 Bad feeling was heightened by the bloody capture of Jerusalem, and the procession of Jewish captives and sacred spoils featured in the triumph of Titus and in the reliefs on his arch. Vespasian heaped insult upon injury by ordering that the half shekel paid annually by the Jews of the Dispersion for the upkeep of the Temple at Jerusalem should henceforth be contributed yearly to the rebuilding of Rome. Nevertheless, many educated Romans admired Jewish monotheism; some were converted to Judaism, and several, even of high family, observed the Jewish Sabbath as a day of worship and rest.21
If we add to the Greeks, the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Jews some Numidians, Nubians, and Ethiopians from Africa; a few Arabs, Parthians, Cappadocians, Armenians, Phrygians, and Bithynians from Asia; powerful “barbarians” from Dalmatia, Thrace, Dacia, and Germany; mustachioed nobles from Gaul, poets and peasants from Spain, and “tattooed savages from Britain”22—we get an ethnic picture of a very heterogeneous and cosmopolitan Rome. Martial marveled at the pliable facility with which the courtesans of Rome readjusted their language and their charms to so varied and polyglot a clientele.23 Juvenal complained that the Orontes, Syria’s great river, was flowing into the Tiber,24 and Tacitus described the capital as “the cesspool of the world.”25 Oriental faces, ways, dress, words, gestures, quarrels, ideas, and faiths made up a great part of the city’s seething life. By the third century the government would be an Oriental monarchy; by the fourth the religion of Rome would be an Oriental creed, and the masters of the world would kneel to the god of the slaves.
There were elements of nobility in this motley crowd. It showed its contempt of Nero’s mistress Poppaea when angry senators dared not speak, and it stormed the senate house to protest the wholesale slaughter of Pedanius Secundus’ slaves.26 The simple virtues of the common man were not wanting in it; the family life of the Jews was exemplary, and the little Christian communities were troubling the pleasure-mad pagan world with their piety and their decency. But most of the inflowing peoples had literally been demoralized by uprootage from their native surroundings, cultures, and moral codes; years of slavery had destroyed in them that self-respect which is the backbone of upright conduct; and daily friction with groups of different customs had worn away still more of their custom-made morality. If Rome had not engulfed so many men of alien blood in so brief a time, if she had passed all these newcomers through her schools instead of her slums, if she had treated them as men with a hundred potential excellences, if she had occasionally closed her gates to let assimiliation catch up with infiltration, she might have gained new racial and literary vitality from the infusion, and might have remained a Roman Rome, the voice and citadel of the West. The task was too great. The victorious city was doomed by the vastness and diversity of her conquests, her native blood was diluted in the ocean of her subjects, her educated classes were drawn down by the power of numbers to the culture of those who had been her slaves. Much breeding overcame good breeding; the fertile conquered became masters in the sterile master’s house.