The luxuries of the home far outran the luxuries of dress. Floors of marble and mosaic; columns of polychrome marble, alabaster, onyx; walls painted with brilliant murals or encrusted with costly stones; ceilings sometimes coffered in gold71 or plate glass;72 tables with citrus wood standing on ivory legs; divans decorated with tortoise shell, ivory, silver, or gold; Alexandrian brocades or Babylonian coverings for which common millionaires paid 800,000, Nero 4,000,000, sesterces;73 beds of bronze fitted with mosquito netting; candelabra of bronze, marble, or glass; statues and paintings and objects of art; vases of Corinthian bronze or Murrhine glass—these were some of the ornaments that crowded the mansions of Nero’s age.
In such a home the master lived as in a museum. Slaves had to be bought to guard this wealth, and others to guard these. Some houses had 400 of them, engaged in attendance, supervision, or industry; the life of the great man, even in the privacy of his rooms, was spent in the publicity of his slaves. To eat with a servant at each elbow, to undress with a slave at each boot, to relax with a menial at every door—this is not paradise. To assure the misery of wealth the great man began his day, about seven, by receiving his “clients” and parasites and offering his cheeks to their kisses. After two hours of this he might breakfast. Then he received and returned formal visits of his friends. Etiquette required that one must repay the calls of every friend, help him in his lawsuits and candidacies, attend the betrothal of his daughter, the coming of age of his son, the reading of his poems, the signing of his will. These and other social obligations were performed with a grace and courtesy not exceeded in any civilization. Then the great man went to the Senate, or labored on some governmental commission, or attended to his personal affairs.
For the man of modest means life was simpler, but not less arduous. After the social calls of the early morning he gave himself to his business till noon. Humble folk were at their work by sunrise; as there was little night life, the Roman took full advantage of the day. A light luncheon came at noon, dinner at three or four—the higher the class, the later the hour. After luncheon and a siesta, the peasant and the employed prolétaire returned to work till nearly sunset; others sought recreation outdoors or in the public baths. The Romans of the Empire took their bathing more religiously than their gods. Like the Japanese, they could bear public better than private smells, and no ancient people but the Egyptians rivaled them in cleanliness. They carried handkerchiefs (sudaria) to wipe away their sweat,74 and brushed their teeth with powders and paste. In the early Republic a bath every eighth day had sufficed; now one had to bathe daily or risk a Martial’s epigram; even the rustic, says Galen, bathed every day.75 Most homes had bathtubs, rich houses had bathroom suites sparkling with marble, glass, or silver fixtures and taps.76 But the majority of free Romans relied on the public baths.
Ordinarily these were privately owned. In 33 B.C.. there were 170 in Rome; in the fourth century A.D. there were 856, besides 1352 public swimming pools.77 More popular than such establishments were the great baths built by the state, managed by concessionaires and staffed by hundreds of slaves. These thermae—“hot [waters]”—erected by Agrippa, Nero, Titus, Trajan, Caracalla, Alexander Severus, Diocletian, and Constantine, were monuments of state-socialistic splendor. The Baths of Nero had 1600 marble seats and accommodated 1600 bathers at one time; the Baths of Caracalla and those of Diocletian accommodated 3000 each. Admission was open to any citizen for a quadrans (1½ cents) ;78 the government met the balance of the cost, and apparently oil and service were included in the fee. The baths were open from daybreak to one P.M. for women, from two to eight P.M. for men; but mixed bathing was allowed by most of the emperors. Normally the visitor went first to a dressing room to change his clothes; then to the palaestra to box, wrestle, run, jump, hurl the disk or the spear, or play ball. One ball game was like our “medicine ball”; in another two opposed groups scrambled for a ball, and carried it forward against each other with all the enterprise of a modern university.79 Sometimes professional ballplayers would come to the baths and give exhibitions.80 Oldsters who preferred to take their exercise by proxy went to massage rooms and had a slave rub away their fat.
Passing to the baths proper, the citizen entered the tepidarium—in this case a warm-air room; thence he went on to the calidarium, or hot-air room; if he wished to perspire still more freely, he moved into the laconicum, and gasped in superheated steam. Then he took a warm bath and washed himself with a novelty learned from the Gauls—soap, made from tallow and the ashes of the beech or the elm.81 These warm rooms were the most popular and gave the baths their Greek name; probably they were Rome’s attempt to forestall or mitigate rheumatism and arthritis.82 The bather progressed to the frigidarium and took a cold bath; he might also dip into the piscina, or swimming pool. Then he had himself rubbed with some oil or ointment, usually made from the olive; this was not washed off, but merely scraped off with a strigil and dried with a towel, so that some oil might be returned to the skin in place of that which the warm baths had removed.
The bather seldom left the thermae at this point. For these were clubhouses as well as baths; they provided rooms for games like dice and chess,83 galleries of painting and statuary, exedrae where friends might sit and converse, libraries and reading rooms, and halls where a musician or a poet might give a recital or a philosopher might explain the world. In these afternoon hours after the bath Roman society found its chief meeting point; both sexes mingled freely in gay but polite association, flirtation, or discussion; there, and at the games and in the parks, the Romans could indulge their passion for talk, their fondness for gossip, and learn all the news and scandal of the day.
If they wished they could have dinner in the restaurant at the baths, but most of them dined at home. Perhaps because of the lassitude caused by exercise and warm bathing, the custom was to recline at meals. Once the women had sat apart while the men reclined; now the women reclined beside the men. The triclinium, or dining room, was so named because it usually contained three couches, arranged in square-magnet form around a serving table. Each couch normally accommodated three persons. The diner rested his head on his left arm, and his arm on a cushion, while the body extended diagonally away from the serving table.
The poorer classes continued to live chiefly on grains, dairy products, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Pliny lists a wide assortment of vegetables in the Roman dietary, from garlic to rape. The well to do ate meat, with the usual superabundance of reckless carnivores. Pork was the favorite flesh food; Pliny praises the pig for furnishing fifty different dainties.84 Pork sausages (botuli) were hawked through the streets in portable ovens, as on our highways today.
When one dined at a banquet he expected rarer foods. The banquet began at four and lasted till late in the night or till the next day. The tables were strewn with flowers and parsley, the air was scented with exotic perfumes, the couches were soft with cushions, the servants were stiff with livery. Between the appetizer (gustatio) and the dessert (secunda mensa, “second table”) came the luxury dishes on which the host and his chef prided themselves. Rare fish, rare birds, rare fruit, appealed to the curiosity as well as the palate. Mullets were bought at a thousand sesterces a pound; Asinius Celer paid 8000 for one; Juvenal growled that a fisherman cost less than a fish. As an added delight for the guests, the mullet might be brought in alive and boiled before their eyes, that they might enjoy the varied colors it took in the agony of death.85 Vedius Pollio raised these sesquipedalian fish in a large tank and fed them with unsatisfactory slaves.86 Eels and snails were considered dainties, but the law forbade the eating of dormice.87 The wings of ostriches, the tongues of flamingoes, the flesh of songbirds, the livers of geese, were favorite dishes. Apicius, a famous epicure under Tiberius, invented the pâté de fois gras by fattening the livers of sows with a diet of figs.88V Custom allowed the diner to empty his stomach with an emetic after a heavy banquet. Some gluttons performed this operation during the meal and then returned to appease their hunger; vomunt ut edant, edunt ut vomant, said Seneca—“they vomit to eat, and eat to vomit.”90 Such behavior was exceptional, and no worse than the braggart drunkenness of American conventioneers. Pleasanter was the custom of presenting gifts to the guests, or letting flowers or perfumes fall upon them from the ceiling, or entertaining them with music, dancing, poetry, or drama. Conversation, loosened with wine and stimulated by the presence of the other sex, would conclude the evening.
We must not think of such banquets as the customary end of a Roman day, or as more frequent in a Roman’s life than the dinners-cum-oratory so popular today. History, like the press, misrepresents life because it loves the exceptional and shuns the newsless career of an honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day. Most Romans were like our neighbors and ourselves: they rose reluctantly, ate too much, worked too much, played too little, loved much, seldom hated, quarreled a bit, talked a great deal, dreamed waking dreams, and slept.