STORY PRIMERS 5SICAL ANTIQUITIES AN ANTIQUITII S, WILK! OSS' SCHOOL READERS, Consisting of Five Books. By WM. T. HARRIS, LL. !>., Sup't of Schools, St. Louis, Mo. A. i, R1CKOFF, A. M., Sup't of Instruction, Cleveland, O. MARK BAILEY, A. M., Instructor in Elocution, Yale College, Appletons' First Reader. 90 pages. Price. 23 cents. Appletons' Second Reader. 142 pages. Price, 37 cents. Appletons' Third Reader. 214 pages. Price, 48 cents. Appletons' Fourth Reader* 243 pages. Price, 64 cents. Appletons' Fifth Reader. 471 pages. Price, $1.15. SOME OF THE PBOJUXEXT FEATCBB8. Large and clear type. Finest pictorial illustrations. Excellence of material, paper, and binding. Fresh in matter, philosophical in method. A practical system of Language Lessons. The combination of the Phonic, Word, and Phrase methods. The combination of the Spelling-book with the Reader. Full directions and suggestions appended to each lesson. The attention given to the use of diacritical marks, silent letters, and phonics. The introduction of instruction in Elocution, at Intervals, through the entire series in an interesting and natural way. Appletons' Elementary Reading Charts. 47 Numbers. STANDARD SUPPLEMENTARY READERS. Edited by WILLIAM SWINTON and GEORGE E. CATHCAET. I. Easy Steps for Little Feet. 30 cents. II. Golden Book of Choice Reading. 35 cents. III. Book of Tales. 58 cents. IV. Readings in Nature's Book. 75 cents. V. Seven American Classics. 58 cents. VI. Seven British Classics. 53 cents. New York : D. APPLETON & CO, 1, 8, & 5 Bond Street Appletons' Elementary Reading Charts, I , FORTY-SEVEN NUMBERS. Prepared by REBECCA D. RICKOFF. Designed to make learning to read a pleasant pastime. Designed to cultivate the observing powers of children. \ Designed to teach the first steps of reading in the rigJit Designed to train the mind of the child by philosophical - methods. Designed to furnish the primary classes with a variety of interesting occupations in school-hours. Every step in advance is in a logical order of progression and development. Pictures, objects, and things are employed, rather than ab- stract rules and naked type. The beautiful and significant illustrations are an especially noticeable and attractive feature of these charts. Every chart in the series has in view a definite object, which is thoroughly and systematically developed. They are in accord with the educational spirit ,of the day, and with the methods followed by the best instructors. They are the only charts planned with special reference to the cultivation of language and the power of expression* They follow the natural method of teaching, appealing to those faculties of the child that are most easily awakeAed, and inciting correct mental processes at the outset. These charts introduce a new and improved mojie of sus- pension while in use, a feature of much practical vajue. These Charts should be in every Primary. school Room in the Country. New York: HISTORY PRIMERS, JOHN RICHARD GREEN. CLASSICAL ANTIQUITIES. II. \ ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. ROMAN TOGA. mm. Edited by J. R. GREEN. CLASSICAL ANTIQUITIES. II. ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. BY A. S. WILKINS, M.A., OWENS COLLEGE, MANCHESTER. \ WITH / NEW YORK: . APPLETON AJ>H3 COMPANY, 'BOND STREET. 1884. presented to the LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO by FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY MR. JOHN _(\ _ROSE donor CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE THE ROMAN CHARACTER 5 CHAPTER II. THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS 15 CHAPTER III. THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE 32 CHAPTER IV. THE ROMAN FAMILY 49 CHAPTER V. THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE 81 CHAPTER VI. THE ROMAN'S RELIGION 105 APPENDIX 122 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE ROMAN TOGA Frontispiece, 1. GROUND-PLAN OF A HOUSE AT POMPEII ... I/ 2. PLAN OF AN ORDINARY ROMAN HOUSE. ... 19 3- PLAN OF ROME 23 4. ATRIUM OF A ROMAN HOUSE (restored). ... 28 5- SMALL PRIVATE I'.ATJi 42 6. HANDMAIDEN DRESSING A BRIDE 76 7. THE CIRCUS (restored by Canina) 95 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. CHAPTER I. THE ROMAN CHARACTER. THE great deeds of the Roman people, and the growth of their empire, from the little cluster of shep- herd's huts on the hills by the Tiber's bank, out to the furthest bounds of the civilized world, have been told already in another of the books of this series, the Primer of Roman History. But, if we wish to know aright the life of any nation, it is not enough that we should learn the battles that they fought, and the lands which they conquered, or even the lives of the great and wise men that lived among them. We need to be able to picture them to ourselves as they went about in their daily life. We want to know about the houses that they lived in, the food they ate, the dress they wore. We have to learn how they spent their days; what trades and professions were common among them ; and how they behaved to their women, their children, and their servants. Above all, we have to do our best to enter into their ways of thinking about their lives and the proper ways of spending them, about their duties to their neighbours, to other nations, and to the Unseen Powers. Whatever the country is of which we are reading, it is not well to pass by things like these, which help to make the life of the people much more real and vivid to us. But least of all can we afford to do so in the case of the Greeks 6 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. and Romans. Here, more than anywhere, there is a danger that we should have vague and shadowy notions of the life that was really lived in the days that seem so far away. We talk of the languages spoken then as " dead languages," and so in a sense they are ; that is to say, the forms in which they are spoken now are very different from those of earlier times. But we are apt to forget that there is nothing in the world more really living to-day than the thoughts which spring from the poems and the sculptures of Greece, from the laws and the government of Rome. And so in the mists and darkness of a distant past, we lose all sense of a life that was like our own in its homely daily cares and occupations. The chief purpose of this little book will be, then, to give some help towards picturing afresh that old Roman life, and clothing what are too often the ghostly shadows of history with forms of flesh and blood, that may bring them nearer to ourselves. 2. The national Roman character. We first catch sight of the people of Rome at the time when their settlement by the bank of the Tiber began to be lifting its head above the rest of the Latin towns, the youngest but the strongest of them all. Rome was built by a band of Latin colonists on a group of hills of no great height, rising close together on the southern bank of the Tiber. Its site seems to tell us of itself what was the purpose of its founding. As you sail up the Tiber from its mouth, the hills of Rome are plainly seen to be the nearest place to the sea where a fortress could be built to shelter the Latin traders from the Etruscan foes to the north of them. We see, then, that first and foremost we must think of the city of Rome as a fortified trading outpost for the towns of the Latin league. But it did not long remain so. The stories of its earliest days little as we can trust to the legends that they tell us and many of the customs of a later time appear to point us to a union of two separate towns I.] THE ROMAN CHARACTER. 7 in one. The Sabines of the hilly inland country, as well as the Latins of the plain, had their fortified outpost on one of the hills which were afterwards enclosed within the walls of Rome. The Latins on the Palatine, the Sabines on the Quirinal, faced each other at first as jealous rivals. But a life of enmity could not last between men who were encamped within little more than a spear's throw of each other. They had either to fight it out to the death, or to join in friendly alliance : and happily they were able to do .the latter. From the union of the two was formed the Roman people of the Quirites (populus Romanus Qiiiritiuni), It may have been the ming- ling of two different races which gave to the Roman people its own distinctive character ; but of this we cannot be certain. What that is which fixes what a nation is to be, is one of the hardest questions of history. The science of language teaches us with certainty that the forefathers of the Italian races, and of all the tribes of Greece, as well as of the Kelts, the Germans, the Slaves, the Persians, and the Hindoos lived together, as a united people, commonly, but hardly correctly, called the Aryans. But after they had parted from each other, hundreds or even thousands of years must have passed, before we meet them again on the field of history. Of the manner in which they spent their time we have hardly the faintest know- ledge. Only it is certain that each tribe must have been living under very different circumstances from those of the others. At first their laws and govern- ment, their customs and occupations, their knowledge of nature and of arts, their religious beliefs and cere- monies, cannot have widely differed. What is known as the comparative method of studying language, politics, and religion helps us to form some notion of that which at first they had in common ; and we can see how already they shared the germs of much which was afterwards developed in very various fashions. But differences of climate and of scenery, differences of 8 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. food and of pursuits, the different foreign nations with whom they fought and traded, the different forms of government under which they came to live, all worked together to give to each separate branch of the one great stock a character quite its own. So we find the Greeks and the Italians, near kinsmen as they were, each with ways of living and thinking widely differing from those of the others. The things which the Greeks cared most for, were of little importance in the eyes of the Romans, and so on the other hand, the vices which the Roman thought the most dis- graceful, were but little regarded by the Greek, and were sometimes even thought to be qualities much to be desired. Hence it came to pass that in the later days, when the Greeks were brought much into con- tact with the Romans, there was often a mutual dis- like, which was based upon something like contempt. The genuine Roman looked down with the pride of a master on the supple, cringing, and fawning falsehood of the degenerate Greeks of his own time. The wily Greek mocked in his sleeve the domineering lord whom he gulled by his flatteries, and felt an equal contempt for the Roman ignorance and boorishness, whether they were open and undisguised, or whether they were cloaked under the idle affectation of a patronage of art and letters. This state of feeling was seen most clearly in the time of the Empire, when Romans and Greeks alike had fallen far from their nobler state. But it came quite naturally out of the essential difference between the character of the two great nations. 3. The basis of the Roman character. At the basis of the Roman character lay the habit of obedience to authority. This began with their earliest years. We shall see hereafter how the absolute power of the father in the household was that upon which all law and order were founded. What the father was to the family, that the state was to the general body of citizens. Those in whose hands it placed its t.] THE ROMAN CHARACTER. g authority, had all its full and unlimited power for the time of holding office. After a magistrate had laid down his post, he could be tried and punished by the people for any offence he had committed, but so long as he was magistrate of the people, no one might venture to resist his commands, or to call him to account for his actions. A refusal to obey the orders of a lawful magistrate was regarded as a shocking crime, deserving of instant death. The despotic power which would thus appear to lie in the hands of the magistrates, was tempered in various ways. In the first place, with rare exceptions, magistrates were always appointed in pairs ; each one had at his side a colleague, with power as unlimited as his own. Hence, whatever the one ordained, it was possible for the other to forbid, and naturally the right of obstruction was allowed to carry the day over the right of action. Then, again, the powers of the various authorities, though unlimited by positive law, were restricted very closely by unwritten custom. To this the Romans were trained to be at least as obe- dient as to the voice of the magistrate, or to the written statutes. The custom of their ancestors (mos maiorum] was of binding force for them. Any de- parture from it was suffered to go unpunished by men, only because they were sure the anger of the gods would rest upon the innovator. What a consul had it in his power to do, was very rarely thought of, we may be sure ; it was what the consuls had been accustomed to do, which was taken as the guide for action. In course of time these checks became too feeble : and the history of Rome, in its internal affairs, is largely the history of repeated attempts to fit old offices to later needs by devices not strange to the spirit of the constitution. But our concern is here only with the general character of the Roman nation, and to understand this aright we must start with the habit of obedience, ingrained in the very life of the people. The early history of the city is io ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. little more than one long series of struggles between the pitricians, who had already all the rights of citizens, and the plebeians, to whom many were at first denied. In a Greek city every struggle would have made the streets of the town run blood, and there would have been little hope of a peaceful settlement, except with the slaughter or banishment of one of the rival parties. In Rome we read of tumults, but they were rarely, if ever, bloody ones : we hear of deeds of harshness and tyranny, but they were done in the regular process of the law, or were strictly within the function of the magistrates : and at last the two great parties settled down quietly side by side, rivals only in serving their common country, and carrying its eagles onwards, vic- torious over every enemy. This habit of obedience, this reverence for authority, was of all the qualities of the Roman perhaps that one which had most to do with making his influence so mighty on the history of the world. His stubborn and relentless energy, his un- shaken courage in trial and defeat, the warmth of his love for his country, have all been equalled among nations that have left but faint traces of their action. But the Roman added to these a readiness to follow orders, to submit to discipline, to work with his fellows for the good of all. It may be that this power of united action dates from the days when the Latin and the Sabine settlement joined together to form a state, which should take in and govern all. Cer- tainly there never was a land where, more than at Rome, the good of the state, as a whole, was the aim of every citizen. In some of the towns of Greece, and especially at Sparta, the state took upon itself to order the life of all its members, to a degree ex- ceeding anything that was ever attempted at Rome. But still we may mark a difference. Everything was done by the state at Sparta, but everything was not done for it. Many of the rules ordained could have no other motive than the perfection of the individual citizen. The state as a whole might well have been I.] THE ROMAfr CHARACTER. II much stronger and happier under freer and more liberal laws ; but it was doubtful whether each several Spartan citizen could have reached the same perfect development under a life less rigorous. Now at Rome the case was otherwise. The government meddled but little with the training of its citizens. Magistrates of high authority, under the name of Censors, were chosen to look after the lives and manners of the people. But their chief duty was to see that the customs of their forefathers (mos maioruni) were not departed from, to check any changes, and to mark with public censure notorious vice or crime. It was in his home, from the lessons and example of his father, that a Roman boy learned to live for his country, and to be proud above all things of the name of Roman citizen ; and he learnt his lesson well. 4. The Roman honour of women. Of all the nations of the old world, there was none in which women were held so much in honour as at Rome. It is true that, in the eye of the law, the wife in the old days passed into the power the hand (manus) of the husband. His rights over her were unbounded, except by religion and the feelings of the people at large. But these required that she should be treated with respect, and even with reverence. In the family, where the husband was master, she was not less mistress. It was her part especially to look after the slaves of the household ; and to join them herself in spinning the wool which furnished the clothing for the family. Even in the days of the Empire, the women who loved the old-fashioned ways still took pleasure in doing this : and Augustus himself was proud to wear the dress that had been spun and made for him by -his haughty and high-born wife Livia. We shall have to say more of the position of women hereafter. It is only to be noticed here, that one of the chief things that gave to the Romans their national character, was their simple, pure, well- ordered family life. 8* 2 12 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. >/ 5. The Roman ideal of character. The character at which it was thought to be proper that a Roman citizen should aim, is given in one word, s;ravitas. It is almost impossible to translate the word into English ; and we do not find the task much easier if we look for a Greek word that answers to it exactly. Perhaps it is "dignity" which comes most near to it. The Roman gravitas was used to cover everything which gave to a man weight and in- fluence with his fellow-citizens. Hence it was directly opposed to levitas, for this denoted everything which made a citizen seem of little importance in the eyes of his fellows. " Gravity," of course, excluded foolish and unbecoming jesting; but its range was much wider than this. It was opposed to fickleness and rashness, and so it denoted a sober and resolute ad- herence to plans that were formed after mature and deliberate thought. If it were accompanied with kindliness and wit, so much the better, of course, at any rate in the judgment of the men of the later Republic ; and so Cicero does not fail to notice how all were united in his ideal Roman noble, the younger Scipio Africanus. But the most essential part of the character, the very backbone of the whole, was their steadfast and sober trustworthiness. / 6. Defects of the Roman character. The points which we have noticed as yet are such as to call for our respect, much rather than our affection. And indeed respect is the feeling which naturally arises towards a Roman of the true old type. In the later days of the Republic, and under the Empire, there were not wanting characters who were gifted with a much more attractive charm. The letters of the younger Pliny, for instance, show us a man who, though not without his weaknesses, quite deserves to be called a thorough gentleman. But Pliny and men like him had gathered all that was best in the letters and the arts of Greece. With much of the rugged strength of the earlier days, they had also I.] THE ROMAN CHARACTER. 13 lost its harshness. But, except in such late and favoured instances, the qualities, which lend such a charm to the Athenians, were strikingly absent from the Romans. The Greek was distinguished for his quick sympathies (Greek Antiquities, p. 8) ; the Roman was hard and unsympathizing. The Greek rated beauty above all things, and could hardly conceive of good- ness as existing apart from it. The Roman to the last was nothing of an artist, and the sculptures which adorned the streets and gardens of Rome, when such things came into fashion, were, with hardly an ex- ception, the work of foreigners. For the Greek the notion of virtue (dpe-nj) was one with that of excel- lence, and the phrase was probably used, in the first case, of the perfect production of some beautiful object. For the Roman virtue was manly prowess, the readiness to do and to dare in battle. The Greeks were proud of their own distinctness from the barbarians who spoke a different tongue and wor- shipped other gods : but at any rate they recognized some duties towards them. The Romans looked upon every stranger as an enemy, and had in the early times only one word for both. Cicero tells us this to show how kindly the early Romans felt to foreigners : he says that they would not call even those with whom they were fighting enemies, but spoke of them simply as strangers. But Cicero lived at a time when the minds of men were full of the thoughts that had come to them from the wise and good Greek teachers. We may be sure that if his forefathers used the same word (hostis] for enemies and for strangers, it was just because they thought every stranger was an enemy to be fought with whenever they pleased to do so. It was only when they had made a treaty of peace with a neighbouring nation, that they felt to have any duty towards them ; and even this was measured only by the strict letter of the treaty. We find the Romans often enough speak- ing of their enemies as " faithless j" but in almost 14 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. every one of the cases that we read about in history, the bad faith lies with the Romans, and not with their enemies. This is plain if we judge the Romans by the stories of their own historians ; but if we had preserved to us any histories written by those of the other side, such as the Samnites or the Cartha- ginians, no doubt we should find in them many more instances. There is also another point on which the Romans differed widely from the Greeks : that is, in their love for discussions. This has been shown elsewhere (Greek Antiquities, p. 9) to have done very much to have made the Greeks and especially the Athenians what they were. It is true that at Rome, just as at Athens, there were assemblies of all the citizens, which had to decide on every important question ; speeches were addressed to these meetings by the leading men of the state ; and the power of speaking well was very much prized, and diligently cultivated, especially in the later days of the republic. But free debate was never the same delight to the people at Rome that it was at Athens. The Romans with their habits of obedience to authority did not feel the same need for having a matter discussed on every side, before they were willing to act as they were counselled by their leaders. At Athens the people delighted to sit all day in the theatre listening to dialogues in tragedies, which seem to us now some- times little better than fine-spun quibblings. At Rome the only plays that were really popular were farces and pantomimes : in tragedies they cared for little but the splendour of the dresses, and the wonderful processions that were brought upon the stage ; and even in the middle of the most charming comedies, the audience would rush off in a body to stare at rope-dancers or at boxers. The Athenians took their pastime in listening to clever pleadings or harangues on the stage, which reminded them of their favourite war of words in the law-courts or the meetings of II.] THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. 15 the people ; the Romans, at least of the later times, took their pleasure in gazing on the chariot-races of the circus, or the cruel combats of the trained fighters (gladiators) with each other or with wild beasts. Athens was proud to be known as the school of Greece ; and even in the days of its decline it was thronged by visitors from every land, who came to gaze on its works of art, to listen to its teachers of rhetoric and philosophy, or to learn its wonderful literature in the very place where Plato had taught under the olive-trees of the Academy, or the crowded theatre had thrilled to the tragedies of Sophocles. The Rome of the Emperors was even more the resort of strangers ; but they came only to bring their talents to the dearest market, and to push their fortunes in the centre of the wealth and power of the world. CHAPTER II. THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. i. Town and Country life. It is probable that Rome was at first only meant for a trading out- post ; but it does not follow from this that the Romans were chiefly traders. The Roman state, more than almost any state in history, was founded on the tillage of the land. The citizens had each their fields and homesteads, and worked on these with their own hands. If a citizen had no farm of his own, there was not much that he could do for his living. There were certain guilds of craftsmen at Rome in the earlier days : flute-blowers, goldsmiths, coppersmiths, carpenters, fullers, dyers, potters, and shoemakers ; and at that time these were not looked down upon, as they were afterwards, when such crafts. had fallen almost entirely into the hands of slaves. But they were shut out, for the most part, from serving: in the army, and therefore from that rank in the state which went along with this. There were no learned professions, such as we have now-a-days, to draw i6 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. people of birth and education into the larger towns ; the first doctors and teachers came at a later time from Greece ; the nobles acted as lawyers for their clients without any fees ; and the priests, as we shall see hereafter, were not in the least like the clergy of modern times. Nor were there any great merchants, such as make the prosperity of cities in our own day. The Romans had nothing but the produce of their land to export; their country was not rich in minerals, and they manufactured nothing but such rude goods as they needed for use at home. Hence the only merchants among them were the landholders, who often had ships to carry their corn and wine down the Tiber to Etruscan or Greek towns, especi- ally to those in Sicily, and to bring back works of art and luxuries, perfumes, linen, purple, ivory and frankincense. We see, then, that the country was of much more importance than the town in the life of a common Roman; and so we will first describe the Roman villa or homestead. We may notice this in passing as another point of difference between the Greeks and the Romans (See Greek Antiquities, p. 12). 2. The Roman house. The simplest form of the early Roman house seems to have been much like that with which the Greeks too started. Four rough wooden walls were covered with a pointed roof of straw or shingles ; an opening was left in the middle by which the smoke could escape ; and under- neath this opening a hole was dug in the floor to gather the rain which came in through it. This was at first the megaron of Homer, and the atrium the blackened chamber of the Romans. But the two nations soon improved on this rude shelter, each in a different way. The Greeks began to build their houses in the form of a row of chambers, ranged round a central court, and used by the men of the family, with a second set of rooms for the women, either built in the same way round a back court, It] THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. or, in poorer houses, placed upon the others as a second story (Greek Antiquities, p. 10). The Romans, on the other hand, never gave up their atrium, and in the poorer houses added but little to it. Of the numerous houses which have been brought to light in digging out the buried town of Pompeii, 1 several are built in this simple fashion. There is still nothing but the one large chamber, open in the middle to the sky, with one or two parts half- walled off, for eat- ing or sleeping rooms. The house, of which a ground plan is given in Fig. i, shows us the next step taken. The atrium (A) is still the chief room inthehouse, but other rooms, which open into it, aremarked off more distinctly. All but one are closed by doors, and there is a proper passage leading GROUND-PLAN Of A HOUSE AT POMPEII. from the street. In this case there is also an upper story, but these are not always met with. Now this is much the kind of house in which we may suppose that the Romans lived in the early days on their farms in the country. No happy accident has pre- served to us any one of the country-houses, in the 1 The town of Pompeii was one of those which, under the Roman Empire, studded the beautiful bay of Campania. In A.D. 79 it was overwhelmed by an eruption of Vesuvius, and its very site was unknown until A. D. 1748. Since that date explorations have been carried on there, and now more than one-third of the city has been brought to light. By this means we have been able to learn far more about the life of the Romans than was ever known before. i8 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. same way in which we have the houses and shops of Pompeii. This could not have been expected ; a common farm-house could not possibly stand un- changed for thousands of years. And the Roman writers describe for us, not the ordinary houses of the people, but the great and splendid villas of the nobles, which our limits will not allow us to speak of here. But nothing that we know about the houses of the simple citizens leads us to fancy them as different from the plan that has been given. The atrium, then, was the common room of the household. Here, in the light that came in from the square hole in the roof the compluvium the meals were cooked at the family hearth ; the children and the slaves took their meals with the father and the mother of the house at the common table; the women sat and span their wool ; and in the earlier days the atrium served too for the chief bed-chamber of the house. The rooms that were afterwards portioned off from it served as store-closets, as sleeping-rooms for the family, or as guest-chambers. The first important change which was made in this simple kind of house is seen beginning in the figure given. One of the chambers (e) is quite open to the atrium, and there is no door between them. This came in time to be a regular part of the building : it was known as the tablinum, and was used as the master's own apartment. Here he kept his papers (tabulae) and his money : here he could sit in quiet, and yet watch all that was going on in the house. A second addition was made in later times, which was brought about by the influence of the Greeks. Be- hind the tablinum, and often joined to the atrium by two narrow passages called the fauces, a walled court or garden was made. This was surrounded with pillars ; and so from the Greek word for a pillar (stylos) it got the name of the peristylium. At first this was nothing but a garden, used for pleasure, and sometimes, as it THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. 19 seems, for profit too, for garden-stuff was grown in it. But in time, in the larger houses, this too was sur- rounded by chambers, used for meals, for sleeping, or for stores. And then, as houses grew more mag- nificent, a second and a larger garden was added behind this, and rooms were built around this second peristylium also. But the usual type of a Roman house in the later days of the Republic was made up of the three chief parts, which we have mentioned : (i) the atrium, with the rooms which were round it, and the passage which led into it from the street; (2) the tablinum in the middle of the house, with the fauces running on each side of it; (3) the peristylium at the back of all, with or without its surrounding chambers. Of these it must be remembered that the atrium and the tablinum had nothing answering to them in the Greek houses ; and that i\\Q peristylium, though brought in probably by the architects of Greece, was not often found in the houses of that country. Fig. 2. L PLAN OF AN ORDINARY ROMAN HOUSE. A A A Bed-chambers (cubicula), or store-rooms (cellae, penariat). Such was the house of a Roman farmer in the good old days of the Republic. The time came 20 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. when the sturdy yeomen, who had been the pride and the stay of Rome, were no longer to be found in the land. Their bones were whitening every battle- field on which the empire of their city had been won ; and their places were filled by gangs of slaves, herded together in prison-like barracks, and tilling the fields in chains (Primer of Roman History, p. 55). In the country there were only, besides the slave-yards, the magnificent palaces of the nobles who owned them. We must go back again to the towns to see the ordinary dwellings of the citizens. 3. The Roman town. A Roman town must have looked on the whole not at all unlike a Greek town ; for the same causes were at work in each case to bring about the general appearance. Even more than in Greece the "town" grew out of a fortified place of refuge, a " height" (capitolium) or " stronghold " (arx) to which the people could fly from the country-villages in time of danger. Here were the temples of the national gods and goddesses ; close beside it was the market-place (forum), which served at the same time as the seat of justice, and the place for the meetings of the people ; and round this in time the houses of the citizens gathered. Hence we have almost always a central height crowned by a fortress, as strong as the people could make it, and around on the slopes of the hill, or built on the plain at its feet, the streets and the houses of the town. The streets as a rule were mean and narrow ; the houses were built of brick, for the most part stuccoed and white-washed, but without any other adornment ; the windows were few and small, closed with shutters or lattices, for glass, though not un- known, was a rare and expensive luxury. The town was surrounded with a wall, like the fortress : but, while the fortress-wall had in it one gate only, for the sake of safety, the town-wall had always three or four, and often more, for the sake of convenience. The outlook from the citadel was often very delightful. II.] THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. 21 There were none of the spires and pinnacles which break the outlines of a modern city, and in the smaller towns the houses had rarely more than a single storey. But the white-washed houses, as they shone out brightly under an Italian sun, were brought into full elief by the gardens of the peri sty Hum ^ and the faint blue smoke that curled up gently from the wood fires in the atrium furnished a magic veil very different from the dingy pall that broods over English towns. And then, though the private houses were often mean and poor, the eye was drawn with the more delight to the temples and the public buildings. These were for the most part ranged around the Jorum, the meeting- place of the citizens. We may take Pompeii as an instance of a town of no great size. In the principal forum we find a temple of Jupiter at the one end, faced at the other by a building which seems to have been the treasury of the town, and also to have held some rooms for the meetings of magistrates. On the one side of the Forum was what was called the Basilica. This was the Hall of Justice, a splendid building supported by twenty-eight large columns, and having at the end opposite the door-way the raised tribunal, from which the magistrate listened to causes. Next came a magnificent temple of Venus, the patron goddess of the city, rising aloft on an elevated base- ment, and surrounded by forty-eight columns, brightly painted. Then came a colonnade (porticus) adorned with paintings, which served as a place of public resort and gossip. It faced the east, and so it was cool in the afternoon, and was a pleasant place in which to stroll and talk in quiet while looking out at the bustling life of the Forum. Close by the side of this was a low vaulted building with several dungeons, used for the prison of the town. On the other side of the Forum, to the left of the temple of Jupiter, was a temple of larger size, supposed to be that of Augustus; then came the council-house, and next to this another temple, sacred to Mercury, or perhaps to Quirinus 22 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. The remainder of this side was almost wholly filled with a splendid building, the gift of Eumachia, a priestess of Ceres, to the town of Pompeii. The purpose of it is not quite clear, but it seems to have been a kind of exchange, perhaps for the fullers in particular, for these set up in it a statue of the priestess. Round the whole of the forum ran a high two-storied row of columns, except where the front of a temple broke the line, and all the columns were of white Corinthian marble. It does not need much fancy to picture to ourselves how splendid the sight must have been in the early morning, when the forum was filled with a bustling crowd, not yet banished to the shade by the glow of the noonday sun. 4. The city of Rome. The city of Rome did not differ at first from other Latin towns, although it much outgrew them. If anything, its streets were narrower and more irregular : according to the story that was commonly believed, after the Gauls had destroyed the city, the people rebuilt their houses how and where they pleased, so that there was no kind of order or regularity. Of the seven hills on which it was built, that one which was steepest and stood most apart from the rest, the Capitoline, was always kept to its ancient use : on the one of its crests rose the great temple sacred to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva ; on the other was the Arx or the citadel. The Palatine mount, where the earlier settlement of the Latins had been made, became in later days the favourite site for the great town-houses of the noble Romans ; but the rest of the hills and the low-lying land between them were crowded with the dwellings of the poorer citizens. As land became more costly, and the population of the city increased, storey after storey was added to the height of the houses. In Rome, just as in the Old Town of Edinburgh, many of the houses were built on the slopes of the hills, so that the front of the house appeared to rise to a towering height, while the back of it consisted perhaps of only three or four storeys. II.] THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. 23 The upper storeys were built for the most part of wood, and were often frail enough. Sometimes they projected one above the other, and overhung the street, like the houses in our own old English towns. This gave to the streets a grateful coolness, though it made them dark and narrow. The upper rooms were usually let out as lodgings (cenacula), and lodging in PLAN OF ROME. a garret was no more to be desired at Rome than it would be among ourselves. We hear of one poor poet under the Emperors living at the top of 200 stairs ; and this is not spoken of as anything very uncommon. The danger from fire was great o the inhabitants; but those who passed along the streets 24 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. ran not less risk from the broken crockery and rubbish that was recklessly thrown from the windows. Only two large open spaces broke the mass of the clustering houses. In the heart of the city, between the Palatine Mount and the Capitol, lay the meeting-place of the citizens, and the centre of the city's life, the Forum Romanum. There was the shrine of Vesta, with the altar on which the sacred fire was always kept burning by the Holy Maidens. Close by was the dwelling of the chief pontiff, the Regia or Palace where Julius Cffisar lived. Around it, in the time of Caesar, were two large basilicas. These were buildings of interest to us, as giving the models for our Christian churches, for which indeed they were often used after the Empire became Christian. The temples of the Pagan gods were, as we shall see afterwards (p. 115), by no means fit for Christian congregations, even if they had not been thought to have been unhallowed from their earlier uses. But the basilica was built to hold a number of persons. It had a central nave divided by pillars from two side aisles, over which there were usually galleries. At one or at both ends there was a circular arched recess, called an apse, in which was a tribunal for the judge in trials. But the body of the building was used as a lounge for idlers, or a place of meeting for business men. just as old St. Paul's was in the time of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth. Besides these buildings, there was in the Forum the Senate- House, and a famous temple of Castor and Pollux; and at that end of the Forum which was close under tiie Capitol there were ancient temples to Saturn and to Concord, with the public offices close beside. The Forum itself was filled with arches, with columns and with statues ; and just in front of the Senate-House was the famous Rostra, a platform adorned with the beaks of captured war-ships, from which the Roman orators addressed the assembled citizens. The second of the open spaces, which caught the eye of one who looked over the city from the Capitol, I!.] THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. 25 lay between the Palatine Mount and the Aventine. This was the Circus Maximus, a place set apart from the earliest days of the city for the sports and races, of which the Romans were always so fond (p. 96). A third great open space of Rome lay to the north- west of the Capitol, and stretched away to the river, which here took a bend, as if to enclose it. This was the famous Plain of Mars, or Campus Martius. It was outside the walls of the ancient city, although it is now the most populous part of modern Rome. An ancient legend told how the corn-fields of the Tarquins had covered it once ; and how, when the tyrants were expelled, their crops were cut down by the people and flung into the river as accursed, while the land was hallowed to Mars, and given over as a place for the exercises of the soldiers and the games of the citizens. Under the Republic no buildings stood there, save one or two temples ; and the only serious business done was when the people were sum- moned to meet in their military order (Comitia Cen- tunata) to elect their magistrates, to pass their laws, and to vote upon peace or war. But the Emperors built on it several of their finest structures ; and in later times, when the Popes had taken up their abode on the Vatican hill, the population was drawn in that direction, and a dense mass of houses covered what had been the recreation ground of the citizens. With these exceptions, we must fancy to ourselves the city of Rome in the days of Csesar as a network of crooked narrow alleys. Two roads (viae) only were fit for the passage of heavy carriages. In the other streets the litters of the wealthy struggled to force their way through the thronging crowds of the loun- gers, who delighted, as they do to this day in the cities of the South, to gossip from morning to night in the open air, under the shade of the towering houses. The shops were poor and mean : and so the streets were crowded with peddlers and hucksters of every kind. Martial tells us of the bawling fellows who 26 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. came from the low and dirty regions across the Tiber to barter sulphur matches for broken glass and crock- ery, to sell boiled peas to the mob of loungers, to carry round hot tripe from the reeking cook-shops, or to show the venomous snakes which they professed to have charmed. And, of all the terrors of a town life, one of the worst was the constant din which rose from . the cries of these and the like. V 5. Furniture of the house. We have seen the general style of house-building, and the look of a Roman town. Let us now enter a Roman house, and try to picture to ourselves how it appeared within. We will take as an example a house of an ordinary middle-class citizen, remembering all the time that if there were some great palaces far more magnificent, there were many more dwellings of a plainer and humbler character. The first thing that would strike us as we pushed back the folding doors (fores) would be the very great contrast between the general appear- ance of the outside and the inside of the house. To the Roman as much as to the Greek the house was intended to be lived in and not to be looked at from without. Hence the outside as a rule was extremely plain and bare. We cannot feel very sure of the look of the front of a house, because, unfortunately, in almost all the houses in Pompeii the upper storeys have been destroyed entirely. But in the house newly discovered on the Palatine, and called " The House of Livia," there is a fresco which gives the picture of a Roman street, just like that of an Eastern town now-a- days, with blank walls, only broken by a few casements high up and plain doorways. We have no reason to suppose that the house was adorned outside with any but the simplest decorations. Inside the case was different. Even in the poorer houses the walls were brightly coloured, and adorned with fresco-paintings, some of which have been preserved to us in almost all their original freshness. Sometimes these paintings are not much more than decorative scrolls and THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. 27 flourishes, but more often they are pictures full of interest, as bringing before us scenes of daily life. We see on the walls in one place the inside of a fuller's workshop, in another a bread-seller of the market-place, with his goods before him on a little table, in another a farm-yard scene, in another a ban- quet. From these we can learn almost as well as from the remains themselves, how the Romans lived. Unfortunately the greater number of the paintings have as their subjects the stories of the Greek mythology, and these are valuable rather for the history of art than as throwing light on the state of the people. The floor in the poorer houses was made of beaten clay, mixed with pot-sherds; but in all the better dwellings it was of large marble slabs, or else of mosaic work. In the latter case little pieces of marble, of precious stone, or of glass, were fitted together in a bed of plaster, so as to form, geometrical patterns, or sometimes elaborate pictures. A splendid specimen of this kind has been found at Pompeii, depicting the battle of Alexander with Darius at Issus. It is sixteen feet in length, and eight in breadth, but, in spite of its size, it is wrought with such wonderful minuteness of detail that 150 separate pieces are con- tained in each square inch. The vigour of the drawing, the brightness of the colouring, the power and skill of the grouping, unite to make this one of the most admirable works of art that has come down to us. Mosaics of this splendid kind are rare, but in almost every house discovered in Pompeii there is something of the sort. It is common to find at the entrance of the house some word of greeting (salve) set in the floor to welcome the visitor : in one case we have the less cheerful motto Cave Canem (take care of the dog), written under a mosaic picture of a chained watch-dog, that looks fierce enough to scare away any intruder. On entering the atrium little if any furniture would be seen. According to the ancient custom, there ;>* ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. II.] THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. 29 would be the altar of the Lares (p. 114) mirrored in the water of the impluvium, but it was only retained as a form, and the altar for sacrifice was usually within. But round the wall would be the statues, either of gods and heroes, or of the family ancestors, and out of the open presses (armaria) on the walls looked out the grim and discoloured masks (imagines), which reproduced the features of those of the family who had held high office in their day (p. 79). For the furniture we must lift the curtains which veiled the door-ways, and enter the smaller living-rooms which were on either side of the atrium. Let us first take the triclinium or dining-room. This was an addition of the later times. At first, as we have seen before, the family table was spread in public (in propatulo) in the atrium ; here sat the husband and wife, with the children at the foot of the couch, or else at a table of their own, and the slaves or humble dependents on benches near, eating whatever was handed to them. But afterwards it came to be the custom for the husband and his guest to recline on the couches, after the later fashion of the Greeks. This the women never did, any more than in Greece (Greek Antiquities, p. 73), except in rare or disreputable cases. And now rooms were set apart for meals ; these were rarely large, for it was not the fashion to give great dinner- parties ; but in the wealthier houses there were often different dining-rooms for the various seasons of the year. The table was usually square, surrounded on three of its sides with couches (lecti), in Greek called klinai, so that the table itself, and afterwards the room in which it was placed, got the name triclinium. The Icctus was made to hold three guests; it was most often a wooden framework with bands of webbing across it, and resting on handsome legs. In the houses of the wealthy the wood was inlaid with ivory or precious metals, and sometimes bronze, gracefully worked, was used in place of it. On these frames were laid mattresses (tori) stuffed with wool or feathers, 30 ROM Ah ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. and for each of the places a cushion (pulvinus), on which the left elbow was rested as the guests reclined at table. Over the couches were spread coverlets (vestes stragulae), dyed with Tyrian purple by those who could afford it. In the later days of the Re- public round tables came into fashion, so that the couches were ranged about them in the form of the letter C ; and these tables were often made of slabs of the rarest woods, resting either on three legs beauti- fully carved, or on one central pillar. Cicero was never a very wealthy man ; but even he is said to have given more than ^5,000 for one of these tables ; and higher prices than this are mentioned by historians. Besides the triclinium, or dinner-table, we might have seen in the room several tripods, on which to stand vessels or dishes, or sometimes only vases for ornament ; of these there are many charming specimens rescued from the ruins of Pompeii. But what perhaps would have struck us more than any- thing would have been the wonderful variety and beauty of the lamps, and the stands on which they were placed. Most of those found at Pompeii were of bronze, but one large one recently discovered is all of gold : one and all they show the greatest grace and delicate finish of workmanship. We can hardly fancy, however, that their usefulness was equal to their beauty, for the wick was nothing but a few loosely-twisted threads, drawn through a hole in the top of the vessel which held the oil, and no glass was in use to keep the flame steady, and to screen it from puffs of wind Of chairs, though rarely used in the dining-room, there was certainly no lack in the other rooms of the house. We have specimens of these in abundance in the wall-paintings of Pompeii, and in sculptures elsewhere ; it is only those which were made of metal and stone which have come down to us, for the wooden chairs and stools of the Pompeian houses, like all other objects of wood, have long since crumbled into ashes. The simplest form II.] THE ROMAN'S DWELLINGS. 31 is the seat without the back, bvit with four perpen- dicular legs : this was the kind most commonly in use in the ruder early ages. Then there is the folding-stool with crossed legs ; one form of this, in which the legs were curved as well as crossed, and in which the framework was plated with ivory, is the famous sella curulis (the chariot seat), granted only to the higher magistrates. The graceful and com- fortable chair, with wide round back and loose stuffed cushions, was of Greek name (cathedra) and origin; its use was properly confined to the women's apart- ments, and only in later days did the luxurious venture to induge in it generally. Lastly, there was the true old Roman equivalent for the '"'grandfather's chair" of the English chimney-corner, the stout and massive solium, high-backed, and sometimes richly carved, with two solid elbows, and often a footstool fastened to it. One of these we may fancy, according to ancient custom, standing in the atrium; for it was always on a seat of this kind that the pater familias sat when he received the morning visits of his clients (P- S3)- I n the days of Cicero and Horace it had become the custom to use a kind of sofa (lectus lucubratorius) to recline upon while reading or writing on tablets : this does not seem to have differed much in form from the couches round the dining-table. The beds in the sleeping-chambers appear to have been often alcoves, built in the walls, on which the mattresses and pillows were laid ; but careful casts, taken from the mud which had hardened around the frames, before they were charred into ashes, show us still the form of some wooden bedsteads not unlike our own. In one case we have even a folding-screen, which appears to have belonged to a bed-room, pre- served to us in outline by the same skilful process. It must always be remembered that everything we know of the furniture of the Romans comes to us from a time when the Greeks had long been teaching their art to the people of Italy, as they have been doing 32 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. since to every civilized nation. Therefore we can say little or nothing of the furniture of the early Roman home; except that there is reason to think of it as extremely plain and simple. It is Greek forms and fashions, Greek designs, and Greek skill in workmanship, which are known to us from the relics of Pompeii. But this does not matter so much, because we have no reason to believe that the houses of Cicero or Csesar were any the less indebted to the taste and the handicraft of Greece, than those which now lie open to our view on the Bay of Naples. One thing more seems certain, that the furniture of a Roman house was much more scanty than that of our own. If we add to the articles already spoken of a few chests (armaria) here and there, we have come to the end of the "plenishing" of a Roman household; and just as in Greece ( Greek Antiquities, p. 17) the furniture does not appear to have formed any large part of the possessions of a family. CHAPTER III. THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE. i. Town and country life. But now that we have seen something of the Roman's house, let us try to follow him through the business and the pleasures of the day. The life of the early time in the country hardly needs description. The farmer would rise with the sun, offer his morning sacrifice, and take his simple breakfast ; then he would go into his fields till the noon-tide heat warned him to return to his dinner and his siesta ; and after his rest he would work again till sunset summoned him to supper and an early sleep. This regular round of work was only broken by family holidays, and by the feasts of the gods, or at times by a visit to the nearest market-town on one of the fair-days (nundinae), held four times every month, to sell the produce of the farm, and to buy the few things needed for the house which were not made at in.] THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE. 33 home. But the town-life, especially in the later days of the Republic and under the Empire, was much more varied, if not more busy. Here our choice must lie between the life of one of the upper class and that of the client or the slave ; for the middle class did not exist. The population of Rome tended ever more and more to part itself off into two layers. The upper stratum was formed in part of the members of the old Roman families patrician and plebeian alike who had been ennobled by centuries of office and enriched by the plunder of the provinces ; but even in greater measure of "new men," often the freedmen of the emperors or the nobles, who had pushed their way to wealth and favour by every kind of meanness and trickery. Below them were the mass of the people, living for the most part on the free distributions of corn by the state, or on the bounty of their patrons, and asking for little but " bread and the games of the circus." 2. The morning call. Let us enter, then, one of the palaces that crown the Palatine or the Esquiline, and watch how its master spends his day. The sun has not yet risen, but even before cock-crow the vesti- bule is crowded with throngs of clients who have come to pay their morning call to their patron. They are dressed in the national toga (p. 73), a cumbrous garb, but one which is indispensable for any visit of cere- mony, like the academical cap and gown in the colleges of our old universities. The steward enters the crowd and scans the faces carefully, that no unlicensed intruder may share in the bounty. Then comes the train of slaves bearing the morning's dole (sportula). This is the ungracious custom which has taken the place of the kindly hospitality of earlier and better days. Once, as in our own baronial castles, the poor dependent was welcomed to the patron's board, where he had his regular place, even though that was a humble one. Now it is much if, after a long day's patient attendance, he is honoured at last with a 34 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. churlish summons to the evening meal. In the place of this he comes now with his basket sometimes at the hour of dinner, but more often at the morning call to fetch away such food as the steward chooses to give him. Sometimes this is bread and wine ; at other times hot meats appear to have been added perhaps the warmed-up fragments of the yesterday's dinner for we read of the portable ovens which the clients had brought by slaves, to keep their victuals warm. In some houses even the semblance of a meal is discarded, and each one of the visitors receives a sum little more than a shilling (25 asses) to buy his dinner for himself. But now the doors of the atrium are opened, and the clients hurry in to greet their patron. If he is one of the olden school he meets them with outstretched hand, and embraces each in turn ; but the pride of the new-blown upstart too often barely deigns to return an answer to the humble salutation, " Hail, master ! " (Ave, doini/ie),, as he turns to the slave who attends him (jiomendator) to ask the name of his visitor. When once the greeting is exchanged, many of the clients hurry off to pay their call at another mansion : others remain to ask for help in business or advice in legal matters, or to learn their patron's wishes and plans for the day. So pass the first two hours of the day, unless some special duty of courtesy to a friend (officium) calls the master off more early than usual. If he should be ill, or indisposed for company, the doors of the atrium are closed ; and the evil news runs quickly through the grumbling crowd that there will be no dole that day. 3. Divisions of the day. Here we may stop to notice that the Romans had two different ways of dividing the day. The formal or civil day began, like ours, with midnight, and was marked out into 24 hours; but the natural day, according to which they reckoned in common life, began with sunrise and ended with sunset, and was divided into twelve hours of equal length, which were counted from sunrise. III.] THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE. 35 But in Rome a day in midwinter is barely nine hours long, while at midsummer it is slightly more than fifteen hours. Hence an "hour" of winter was not quite three quarters of an hour in length, while a midsummer hour was a little more than an hour and a quarter. The seventh hour always began at noon, but the second hour in June began at about 5.45 a.m., and in December at about 8.15 a.m. 4. The day's business. At the third hour of the morning the business of the day began. But before this it was often the custom to take a slight meal (ientaculum), answering rather to the early coffee and roll of the French than to our own English breakfast. It consisted only of bread, either dipped in wine, or taken with some slight relish, such as honey, dates, olives, or cheese. We read in Martial how boys on their way to morning school bought as their ientaculum a kind of short-cake at the baker's. After this light^ refreshment the master of the house goes out with his train of clients attending him. If he has any engagement in th^e law-courts, either on his own account or as an advocate for others, now is the time to appear there, to plead his cause, and to receive the cheers of his clients for his eloquence. If he is free from business, he may go and call upon a friend, to enquire after the health of one who is sick, to learn news of one who is absent, or to pay his court to some wealthy widow, from whom he hopes for a legacy. Perhaps it is his duty to appear at a betrothal or a wedding, to witness the signing of a will, to accompany the son of a friend to the forum for the ceremony of assuming the dress of manhood (p. 74), or to attend some kinsman on his canvass. In any case his clients are expected to struggle along after the litter, in which he rides at ease borne by six tall slaves, up hill and down hill, through the pushing crowds, and all the filth of the ill-paved, ill-kept streets. Often they are not dismissed before the tenth hour of the day, hoping in vain for an invitation to the 36 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. dinner-table, and ill-content with the shilling dole, which is given to them in place of it. But, if the patron is somewhat more given to ease and quiet, he will return to his house by noon, the hour which was often regarded as the natural limit to business. Then, if he has not done so earlier, he takes the first sub- stantial meal of the day, the prandium or dejeuner a la fourchette. In the older times it had been the custom to make of the cena the mid-day meal, the prandium being really a breakfast; but the hour for the cena came by degrees to be later, just as has been the case in our own land, where Queen Elizabeth dined at noon, or even earlier, and as it was also in Athens (Greek Antiquities, p. 28). And so the pran- dium, like the Greek apio-rov or the French dejeuner, came to be a break in the work of the morning, and not a meal taken before it began. It consisted of dishes of meat, hot and cold, fish, vegetables, fruit, bread, and wine. 5. The siesta. After \heprandium came the mid- day rest (meridiatio) or siesta. This was not quite so universal in Rome as it was in Athens, or as it now is in modern Italy. There in summer the shops and even the churches are shut ; no one ventures out ; and the stillness at noon is greater than at midnight. But in Rome the legal business, the sittings of the courts, the meetings of the people and the senate, went on without a break. Cicero tells us that it was only after he had given up his daily toil in the forum that he was able to take a midday rest. Perhaps in the earlier days this was one of the many points on which the customs of the country differed from those of the town ; we can hardly believe that work went on in the fields at noonday under an Italian sun in August ; but in the towns we find no trace of the custom till the later days of the Republic; and then it is put down to the growth of foreign habits of ease and idleness. In time it became universal. Tacitus tells us a story how in a Roman town of Africa a man III.] THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE. 37 of humble birth was walking " in the middle of the day through the deserted colonnades," when he saw a spectral figure of more than human size, which promised him high honours in the future : he puts his ghost-story at midday, as naturally as we might at midnight. Rome itself too was taken by Alaric the Goth at a time when its garrison were said to have been sunk in their midday sleep. 6. Games and exercises. After the siesta fol- lows, as a matter of course, the daily exercise. The young would take this in the form of military sports in the Campus Martius, running, leaping, wrestling, fencing, and the like : but even the old could not neglect it without the charge of indolence. For these the favourite amusement was, as it is to the present day in Italy, the game of ball. In every wealthy house there was a ball-room (sphaeristerium), gener- ally close to the baths; and the great public baths, of which we shall have to speak immediately, pro- vided places of the same kind for the poorer citizens. The players stripped for the game, even removing their shoes ; and in winter-time the room was heated to avoid a chill while playing. Three kinds of ball seem to have been in use. The largest, but lightest, was the follis, which was filled with air, like our football, and struck with the hand or arm, sometimes provided with a glove. The game played with this seems to have been a quiet one, and looked upon as proper only for old gentlemen and children; at one time Augustus was fond of it. The ball next in size was the paganica, but we do not know why it was called so, nor how it was especially used. The last kind was the pila, a small ball, stuffed with feathers, and used in many different games. The descriptions of these are not always clear, but we can see that the favourite game, the trigon, must have answered pretty nearly to our catch-ball, seemingly with six balls going at a time among three players. Besides this there was the harpastum, a kind of 38 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. boisterous scramble for one ball, or more probably for several balls, among a number of players. Cicero and Horace both tell us that they did not care for these games ; but it was not by any means that they were despised. The famous Mucius Scaevola the Augur, the most learned lawyer of his day, was an excellent ball-player, and used to refresh himself with it daily after his labours in the law-courts ; and even that rigid philosopher, the younger Cato, was often seen playing it in public on the Campus Martius. On the other hand, Seneca speaks of those who give up all their days to ball-playing, much as a serious man might now-a-days of one who lived for nothing but cricket. 7. The baths. The time given to exercise, though regular, was not long. When the eighth hour came, the bells of the public baths were rung, as a sign that now they were open, and the people came flocking in to what was one of the greatest and most universal of pleasures. This again, was one of the luxuries of later days. In earlier times a bath was, as a rule, only taken on the nundinae, and merely for the sake of cleanliness, and the first bath-houses, public as well as private, seem to have been quite simple. At most they had two chambers, one for the cold plunge- bath, and another for the warm bath, and a swim in the Tiber was preferred, at least by the younger men, to either. But as early as the second Punic war speculators had begun to build baths (balineae or balneae) after the fashion of the Greek fiaXavcia, to take the place of the early national wash-house (lavatrina). At first, just as in Greece in the days of Aristophanes, old-fashioned folk strongly opposed these luxurious habits, and looked upon them as very weakening ; but in this, as in so many other things, the foreign ways soon became popular. The numbers of the baths increased, and Agrippa the friend of Augustus is said to have added as many as 170 to those already in use. Later emperors reared vast piles of buildings known Hi.] THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE. 39 as thermae, to include baths, gymnasia, and often libraries ; and none of the ruins of Rome are more extensive than those which are known as the Baths of Titus, of Caracalla, and of Diocletian. At last there was not a town in the provinces, there was hardly a village, without its public bath. Very many of these have been discovered, but the best-preserved of all are the two which have been brought to view in Pompeii. By the help of these we can get a very clear notion of the baths, in which the Romans so delighted. Many books, even of recent writers, give a picture of a Roman bath, which was said to have been found on a wall in the Thermae of Titus ; but this has been plainly shown to be a forgery, and in some points it is quite misleading. However, we do not need its help with the number of remains which are still to be found. The Roman bath did not differ much from that which has been so common of late in England under the name of the Turkish bath. It needed at the least three chambers (cellae), for the four kinds of bathing which, either separately or one after another, was usually practised. There was (i) the frigidarium, the cold bath, close to which, or in which, some of the bathers removed their dress, and were afterwards anointed; (2) the tepidarium, a warm room, also intended for undressing, and anointing, if the bathers feared a chill; (3) the caldarium, a heated chamber, in which the bathers could either take a hot-air bath, as in the Turkish bath, or an ordinary warm-bath. But, of course, in large baths each of these chambers had several smaller ones connected with it; and, besides the rooms used for bathing, there were others intended for various forms of social intercourse, or for exercise. It was most common for two sets of baths to be built together, one for the use of men, the other for women. In the middle was the furnace, by which the whole was heated, and over this, adjoining each other, Avere the two caldaria. These were raised on arches, so that the heat from the furnace could pass 40 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. along underneath them; and there were also earthen- ware pipes to carry the heat through the double walls of the chambers. Over the furnaces were also large boilers to supply hot water whenever it was needed. On entering, the bathers first paid the fee for admis- sion, which in the public baths was a very trifling sum only a quadrans, little more than half-a-farthing while in the baths belonging to private speculators higher fees were charged. Then they entered the warm chamber (iepidarium) or the cold one (frigid- ariutri) according to taste, or, in the case of the larger baths, one of the undressing-rooms (apodyteria) at- tached to these. Here there were slaves in waiting to take charge of the clothes, and to do all needful services ; and the bathers sat a while on the benches round the room in order to perspire freely. At Pom- peii there is a fountain of cold water in the middle of the tepidarium, at which the bathers might refresh themselves if the heat was found to be too great ; but this does not seem to have been usual. From this room they next went into the caldarium, where the hot-bath was taken, in earlier times in tubs (alvei) ranged about in the room, but afterwards in a large tank or basin (piscina), sunk in the middle of the floor. As this chamber was full of warm vapour, we find that the seats here were of wood, not of bronze, as they were in the tepidarium, where there was not the same risk of their rusting. Here there were always basins (labra) of cold water, which was freely poured over the bathers : in one bath, of which we have the description, these labra were of solid silver. After the warm bath, the bathers returned to the cold room, where there was always a large pool of water (piscina), in which they took a plunge. Some, how- ever, preferred another pool which was open to the sky, and therefore not quite so cold. Then followed an important part of the bath in the rubbing, or rather scraping down (destringere), and the subsequent an- ointing. As soon as the cold bath was over the bather III.] THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE. 41 went into the warm room (tepidarium\ or else into a special chamber (destrictonum, unctorium) ; here he was scraped down with an instrument made for the purpose, called a strigilis, of which many specimens still remain to us; then rubbed down with linen towels; and, finally, anointed with perfumed oil or unguents. We often hear of slaves following their masters or their mistresses to the baths, carrying with them several strigils, towels, and oil-flasks (ampullae). Then the bathers rested in the various lounges, provided for them so abundantly in the great thermae, or watched the sports of the palaestra, or took a turn or two in the colonnades, until it was time for them to return home to dinner. There was one other room, not yet mentioned, which was even more like a Turkish bath than those already described. This was the Laconicum, a kind of chamber first made the fashion at Rome by Agrippa. It was generally built just over the furnace, and it does not seem to have had any water in it ; so that it was used merely as a heat-bath. But apparently it did not form part of the usual daily bath, but was reserved for invalids, and for those who wished to cure indigestion by violent perspiration. The figure given below represents a small private bath discovered in 1855 at Caerwent in Monmouthshire. It shows very clearly how the heat was made to pass from one chamber into another; but it is entirely without the smaller rooms, and the places for lounge and exercise, which form so large a part of public baths like those discovered at Pompeii, and in many other places. 8. The dinner. The chief meal of the day was taken just after the bath, that is to say, as a rule, at the ninth hour (about 2.30 p.m. in summer, and 1.30 p.m. in winter). This was the cena; and with regard to it two mistakes are very commonly made. In the first place, its name is often spelt coena; but this is entirely wrong. Like many other blunders in Latin spelling, it arose from a notion that the word came ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. FIG. 5. SMALL PRIVATE BATH. A Entrance. B Frigidarium. C Cold Piscina, D Apodyterium. Tcpidarium. F Caldarium. G Hot Piscina. H Hot Chamber. / Furnace in.] THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE. 43 from a Greek word in this case KOIVIJ, "a common meal" with which it had really nothing to do: ccna is a genuine Latin word, not a borrowed one at all, and it means simply " meal/'' or " eating." In the second place, it is often translated " supper," a correct translation only for those people, if such there are, who take their supper as a rule before 3 o'clock in the afternoon. There are instances, of course, of a cena later than this, especially with those who were busy in the law-courts till the tenth hour of the day : but the ninth hour was quite the usual one. The like mistake is often made about the Greek word Sdirvov, which is sometimes translated " supper," though it never was this. But the SCITTVOV appears to have been taken usually an hour or two later than the ccna (Greek Antiquities, p. 72). What seems rather odd to us, however, is that if any luxurious banquet was to be given, they began it, not as we might, somewhat later than usual, but earlier; so that to dine early in the day (de die) was regarded as a proof of extravagance and self-indulgence, and a " timely banquet " (tcmpestivum conviviuni) was the same thing as an elaborate one. But naturally a banquet which began betimes might also be carried on late, perhaps till the morning light broke upon the revellers ; and even those who lived quite simply used to sit for a long while over their dinner. In early days the common fare at dinner, as well as at breakfast, was the national dish of porridge (pulmentum) made of wheat or spelt (far) ; and it long continued to be so among the poorer classes. So Plautus, speaking of some joiner's work, says that it was not made by a "clumsy porridge-eating Roman workman." The only usual addition was vegetables of various kinds, such as pease, beans, and lentils (Icgumina) or cabbage, leeks and onions (holerd) : but meat was rarely eaten, even at the tables of the noble. Even bread (pants) was not always used : when it was needed it was made at home by 10* 44 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. the women or the slaves, as it was down to a late date in the country parts of Italy. There were no bakers by trade in Rome until the third Macedonian war, nearly 600 years after the date commonly given for the founding of the city. We can readily believe too that a cook was, in those days, a needless member of a household ; in the time of Plautus, about 200 years before Christ, we find that a cook was hired from the market whenever a feast was to be given, just as was the custom at Athens. But afterwards cooks (coqui) and fancy bakers (pistores) came to be among the most valued and costly of slaves. Per- haps it was at first the feasts, which followed on sacrifices, that afforded the suggestion of better living, and a knowledge of the luxury of the Greeks gave rise to increased extravagance, which soon far outran that of their teachers. We have accounts of dinners under the Emperors which could hardly be surpassed for the profuse and reckless gluttony displayed. The dining-room has already been described. Here the host and his guests took their places, reclining on the couches around the table, on which no cloth was laid for fear of hiding its beauties. Every guest had his table-napkin (mappa), either supplied by the host, or as often brought with him from home. As each one rested on his left elbow, the use of a knife and fork was impossible : indeed the custom of eating with a fork is not more than 500 years old, and appears to have been invented late in the fourteenth century in Italy; it did not reach England before the beginning of the seventeenth century. Forks were, however, used by the carvers, who cut up the meat before it was placed on the table ; the art of doing this gracefully was studied carefully, and practised in training schools on jointed wooden models. Spoons (ligulae) were in use for such dishes as required them; but the fingers were chiefly employed, just as is the case in the East still ; it is not certain whether knives were set on at table ; but as ivory-handled knives as HI.] THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE. 45 well as spoons have been found by the side of food placed in tombs, it is likely that they were. An article never wanting on the table was the salt-cellar : even in the poorest houses this was, if possible, of silver, and it was looked upon as a sacred vessel. It was used not only to flavour the dishes, but also to mingle with the meal (mola salsa) in the sacrifice, which was offered in the course of the dinner. In wealthy houses the table was loaded with silver plate, which, when not needed for the meal, was ranged for show on the side-board (abacus). At a dinner- party every one of course appeared in his best dress ; the cumbrous toga was replaced by a gay-coloured dining garment (p. 75), and sandals (soleae) were worn instead of the ordinary shoe. But as soon as a guest had taken his place on the couch, his slave, who had come with him from his house, removed his sandals, and took charge of them until they were called for ; this was the signal for leaving. In an ordinary dinner there were three distinct courses. The first was called gustus or gustatio, or sometimes promulsio, because it preceded the draught of mulsum, or wine sweetened with honey. This course was a device of later times, and consisted of such things as were supposed to whet the appetite for the more solid dishes which followed. These were mostly piquant vegetables, such as sorrel, lettuce, pickled cabbage and gherkins, radishes, mushrooms, and the like, to which were often added oysters and small salt fish, such as sardines ; and eggs were also included : from the last item we get the common proverb, ab ovo iisque ad mala, meaning, " from the beginning to the end." Then followed the cena proper, in the old days only a single course, such as the " beans and bacon " on which Horace tells us he dined at his farm in the country. But afterwards six or seven courses (fercula) were not uncommon, and each of these consisted of a number of dishes, which were brought in piled up high one upon another. It 46 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. would be an almost endless task to recount the various forms of fish, flesh, and fowl which were ga- thered from the farthest corners of the earth, to sate the gluttony of the wealthy Romans under the Empire. We must be content with noticing that, with all their extravagance, the Romans never attained to good taste in the matters of the table. Their dishes were distinguished much more for their rarity, costliness, and strangeness, than they were for their delicacy and appropriateness ; and we can fancy how the fine tastes of a Greek would have revolted at the coarse profusion with which his Roman patron's board was groaning. Without going into details, which would take up too much space, we may mention two articles, seen daily at every table now, which were never used by the Romans. Sugar (saccharum) is spoken of by Pliny as "a kind of white gum, collecting on reeds in Arabia and India, brittle to the teeth, and of use only in medicine ; " for sweetening purposes honey was always employed. And, in the same way, butter (butyrum) was recommended by doctors, as a plaster, but in cookery its place was taken, just as in Southern Europe now-a-days, by olive-oil. After the various courses of the cena proper were over, there was a brief silence, while the salted meal (rnola salsa) and libations of wine were offered to the household gods (Lares) on the family altar ; after the establishment of the Empire the Genius of the Em- peror also received due honours at this time. Then followed the dessert or "second tables" (secundae mensae), when fruits and cakes were brought on, just as with us. The cakes especially seem to have been very abundant and various in kind; we find many different sorts mentioned, though it is not easy to distinguish them. The most common of the old national sweets were the placenta, a cake made with honey and cheese, and the laganum, a kind of pan- cake, or fritters. Others, by their Greek names, show that they were of later importation. III.] THE ROMAN'S DAILY LIFE. 47 9. The drinking. The only drink in common use was wine. This was rarely drunk unmixed : to do so was regarded as a mark of intemperance. During the dinner each guest had his wine mingled to his taste in his own cup, and slaves brought round both warm and cold water, but the former was more usually taken, and was regarded as much more wholesome. Sometimes, however, ice was put into the wine, or the mixture was cooled with snow in vessels made for the purpose, some of which are still in existence. With the fruit and cakes of the " second tables " the dinner came to an end. But, in the days of the later luxury, the Romans borrowed from the Greeks the custom of the symposium or drinking-bout, in Latin comissatio. This was called Graeco more biberc. The tables were cleared of dishes ; garlands, especi- ally of roses, and perfumes were brought by the slaves ; sometimes new guests came in ; and the party settled themselves down to drinking. A "king of the feast," or " master of the drinking " (rex convivii, arbiter bibendi} was chosen by casting dice. The great mixing bowl (crater) was placed in the middle of the table, and the wine and water were mingled in it according to his orders. Sometimes, if warm water (calda) were preferred for the mixture, the bowl had a case for hot coals in the centre, somewhat like our tea-urns ; a very beautiful bowl of this kind, with a cover and a top, was found in the ruins of Pompeii. Each guest had his drinking-cup (poculum), which was filled from the bowl by a dipper (cyathus) holding one twelfth of a pint. It was the custom for the master of the feast to decide how many cyathi should be drunk each time that the cups were rilled again ; and when a health was drunk this number was always the same with the number of letters in the name. Many kinds of wine were in favour at Rome, but those most prized were the Caecuban, Setine, Faleniian, Massic, and Calene wines, all grown in Campania, or in that part of Latium which bordered upon it, and of Greek 6 48 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. wines the Thasian, the Chian, and the Lesbian. It was a common custom to mix the wine, not only with spices, but even with perfumed oils. 10. The amusements of society. The Ro- mans, for the most part, cared much less than the Greeks did for the intellectual pleasures of society. It was quite the custom for a Greek gentleman to be able to sing a song, and to accompany himself upon the lyre ; but we never hear of anything of the kind in the case of a Roman. The riddles and jokes of an Athenian dinner-party were famous; but the nearest approach to these in Rome was when some would-be poet insisted in adding a new terror to the weariness of the long debauch by reciting his latest productions. On the other hand, games of chance were very much relished. The frequent laws that were passed against gambling show how common the practice was, and how useless was the effort to restrain it. Two kinds of dice were in use : the first (tesserae) were like our own, cubes marked on each of their six sides with numbers from one up to six. Two, or sometimes three of these were played with, and they were thrown, as with us, out of a dice-box (phimus or fritillus), the player who threw the highest number winning. The second kind (tali) were originally the knuckle-bones of animals, and were played with much as they are by children now ; but afterwards they were used as dice, and made of various materials. But they always retained pretty nearly their proper shape, and hence the two ends were rounded, and there were only four sides on which they could rest. These were marked with the numbers i, 3, 4, and 6. Four tali were used in playing : the highest cast, called Venus, was when all came up different numbers, the lowest, called " the dog" (canis), was when four aces were presented. Sometimes, however, tali were used like tesserae, and the best throw was that in which the highest number of pips appeared. Besides the stakes that were played for, betting was undoubtedly largely practised. IV.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 49 From the earliest times it had been a Roman custom to have a piper present at a banquet, though his services seem to have been called for only at the sacrifice to the household gods. But afterwards it came to be the fashion to have all kinds of music and singing throughout the dinner. As tastes grew more corrupt, buffoons and pantomimes, rope-dancers and conjurors, dwarfs and dancing-girls, were brought in to help out the amusements, and we even find an instance under the Empire of gladiators fighting at a dinner-party. CHAPTER IV. THE ROMAN FAMILY. i. The idea of the family. The family, as has been said before, was the very keystone of the Roman state. In some measure this was the case with all the people of the Aryan stock. It was the growth of a family into a clan, and of a clan into a tribe, which was believed to be the origin of every state. Every citizen was thought to be related to every other one, either by actual bonds of kinship, or by ties of adoption, which were looked upon as in every way equivalent. The king was the natural head of the nation, as holding still by inheritance the place which had once been held by the father of the family from which the nation had sprung. But already in very early days we find that it was not the custom for him to do anything of great import- ance without hearing the opinion of the fathers (patres) who were the heads of the various clans ; and questions of peace or war were always brought before the great assembly of the fathers of every household. In some countries, such as Greece, the power and importance of the father soon came to be greatly limited. The wish to give to every full- grown citizen all the freedom of action that was possible, could not but loosen the bonds that bound 50 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. the son to the father, the member of a clan to the head of it. We have only traces here and there of that close union and entire dependence, which must have been at one time universal. In Rome, on the other hand, it long continued to be the rule which shaped the life of the nation. The lawful power of the father (patria potestas) was the natural result of his place as the head of the family. He alone could speak and act for the family; he was the priest of the household gods (p. 114): he was in the eye of the law the only holder of the family property. The Roman, with that love for practical consistency which we have noticed already, would not limit his power in any way. The wife was legally "in the hand" (in manu) of her husband, and all the rights which her father had had over her, while she lived in his house, passed over to the citizen to whom, without any choice of her own, he gave her in marriage (in matrimo nium dedif). If any children were born to them, they were placed at the father's feet, and it was quite within his discretion to take them up (susdpen, tollere) and have them reared, or to expose them to death. Deformed and weakly children were often drowned, and we even read of cases in which an infant was made away with, only because it was born on an unlucky day. With girls especially the custom of exposure seems to have been so common, that, whereas female children are usually slightly more numerous than male, the number of women in Rome was considerably less than that of men. Tacitus speaks of it as something strange among our German kinsfolk that it was not lawful so to limit the number of children. In Italy the punishment of the sin was not long in coming. It was the scarcity of men which, more than anything else, caused the fall of the Roman Empire under those very tribes which were proud of their numerous families. But the rigorous logic of the Roman mind made them give to the father this power of life and death over his children, and in later days IV.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 51 their cowardly self-indulgence led them to use it largely. According to the letter of the law the patria potestas ceased only with the death of the father, with his loss of citizenship by exile, or with his emancipa- tion of his son; otherwise the son was entirely de- pendent on his father, and could not even hold any property of his own, whether earned or inherited, but all went to the family, that is, to the father as head of it It was only in his public acts as citizen that he was free to act as he pleased. Here the state as the supreme authority overrode the claims of the lesser authority of the father. A story is told which shows this well. At one time in the Second Punic War, Fabius Cunctator, an old and successful general, was sent to serve as lieutenant under his son, who was one of the consuls of the year. The son went out to meet his father, preceded by his lictors, marching as usual in single file. The old general had ridden past eleven of the lictors, when his son sternly bade him dismount. Then the father, springing from his horse, replied, " I only wished to see, my son, whether you remembered, as you ought, that you were a Roman consul." 2. The names. The importance of the family in the Roman state is very well seen from the custom with regard to names. In Greece each citizen had a name of his own, most commonly that of his grand- father, but sometimes that of his father, and sometimes chosen, as with us, merely because it sounded well and seemed to be "aristocratic," long names being especially in favour. In public business and for official purposes the name of the father was usually added, and, in early times, the name of the family to which the man belonged : thus Kimon, the rival of Perikles, was known officially as Kimon (son) of Miltiades, the Lakiad; the father of Miltiades (we may notice) having again been Kimon, and his grandfather Miltiades. But afterwards it came to be the custom to take no account of the family-name, and to put in 52 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. place of it the demc or parish in which the man lived : thus Demosthenes the orator was known in public documents as Demosthenes (son) of Demosthenes, the Paianian. Now at Rome it was very different. There the family name was the nornen, the name par ex- cellence. This was always in genuine Roman families an adjective form in ius, and perhaps it was always, what we know it was in a great many cases, a "patronymic," meaning "son of ," like so many, perhaps the majority, of our English surnames. This name was held by every member of the clan, in the case of the women in the feminine form ; and also by the clients and the freedmen. But every man had also a praenomen of his own, answering somewhat to our Christian name. Of these there were only eighteen in common use, and four or five of them were limited in use to particular families. The praenomina are often of doubtful meaning, but sometimes they seem to have reference to the time or conditions of the birth of the child. In the old days it was the practice to describe a man formally by the use of his own prae- nomen and nomen, together with his father's prae- nomen : as Q. Fabius M.f., i.e., Quintus Fabius, Marci filius. As the clans grew in numbers, and parted off into various families, only loosely connected with each other by the common rites in which they all took part, these families came to be distinguished by sur- names, added to the proper name of the clan. These surnames (cognomina) were very often merely nick- names, again reminding us of many of our English names ; and the old Romans seem to have been as willing to label a man according to some personal peculiarity as English school-boys are at the present day. Sometimes the nick-name was a complimentary one; thus two families of the Claudian clan had as cognomina Pulcher (handsome) and Xero (manly) ; but more often they were quite the reverse : thus Titus Maccius, the comic poet, had the nick-name Plautus (splay-foot), Quintus Horatius was surnamed IV.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 53 Flaccus (loose-eared), Publius Ovidius was surnamed Naso (big-nose), and Marcus Tullius Cicero the orator got his cognomen rather from the fact that an ancestor had on his face a wart like a chick-pea (deer) than because he first grew that vegetable. Cossus means "wrinkled," Calvus "bald," Cato "shrewd," Brutus " stupid," Caesar probably " hard-hitter." Such names were given at first to some member of a family whom they suited, but afterwards they became hereditary, and were used with no more thought of unfitness than English names like Bigg or Little, Baker or Arm- strong. Then they were employed in formal docu- ments, but always so that their origin was clear ; that is, they were placed after the proper name ; Cicero's official designation would be Marcus Tullius M. f. M. n. (Marci nepos) Cicero. We may notice here in passing how this illustrates the custom of giving to the eldest son the praenomen of his father; we have instances in which this is recorded on a tombstone for five generations back, evidently to show that the man who was buried there belonged to a branch of a family which had for all that time been its lawful head. The praenomen was naturally, like our modern Christian names, the name used in the family, and by those who were intimate or wished to be thought familiar. The cognomen by itself was used in ordinary intercourse, the praenomen being added to it only in measured or earnest address; and the nomen proper passed almost wholly out of use, except for formal purposes. Under the Emperors the older rules for the use of names were very much neglected ; and there are cases both of the prae- nomen being used as the ordinary name, as with the Emperors Caius and Titus, and of the cognomen taking the place of the praenomen even for family use, as with Nero. At last the confusion got so complete that we find one man rejoicing, like a Spanish grandee, in thirty names, heaped one upon another, without the slightest attempt at order. 54 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. But what is especially to be noticed is that, while with a Greek citizen his own individual name was almost the only one under which he was ever known, with a Roman the name by which he was addressed by his fellow-citizens was that which marked him out at once as belonging to a certain family. The same was the case even more completely with the women. In the earlier days they were known simply as women belonging to such a family, the Fabian, the Valerian, or the Aemilian. If there were two belonging to the house of a Fabius, they were distinguished as the elder (inaior) and the younger (minor] Fabian (woman). It was only under the Empire, when in many ways they had reached greater freedom and prominence, that they took also a cog- nomen, or sometimes even two. 3. Marriage. There were two chief kinds of marriage at Rome : in the one a woman passed quite out of the power (manus) of her father into that of her husband ; in the latter she did not, but remained in her father's power. The former kind was thought in the old days much the more proper; but in later times it fell greatly into disuse. A marriage of the first kind might be brought about in one of three ways. There was first the religious form of con- farreatio : in this the presence of the Chief Pontiff and the Priest of Jove (Flamen Dialis, p. 117) was needed, besides ten Roman citizens as witnesses; and a cake of sacred corn (far) was solemnly broken and tasted by the bride and bridegroom. Then there was marriage by usus, in which the wife passed into the legal power of the husband simply by having lived with him as his wife for a twelvemonth, without leaving his house for three days together. And, lastly, there was marriage by purchase (coemptio), in which the father formally sold his daughter to the bridegroom, the daughter at the same time giving her consent in the presence of witnesses. But these three forms, as well as the laxer form of marriage. iv.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 55 which afterwards became far more common, seem to have differed only in the view of the law; and the rest of the bridal ceremonies were almost ' the same in all. First came the betrothal, performed by the exchange of the words spondesne? spondee; and followed, as often with us, by the present of a ring from the bridegroom to the bride, as a pledge that he would keep his word. It was customary also for him to make the bride some more valuable present as an Earnest (arra) ; and this was forfeited if the marriage did not take place. Then before sunrise on the morning of the wedding-day the auspices were taken, either by augurs or by haruspices (p. 1 16). The bride was dressed in a white tunic, with a bright red veil (flammeum) over her head, and her hair was parted into six locks (crines) with the point of a spear, and tied up with ribbons. When the guests were assembled at the house of the father of the bride, the auspices were declared, and the words of the marriage contract were pronounced in the presence of the witnesses. The language would vary according as the bride and bridegroom were of patrician or plebeian family : if both were patricians the form of the confarr- eatio would be used ; if either or both were plebeians, the form would be that of coemptio. After the solemn words were uttered, the bride's attendant (pronuba), a married woman who was a friend of the family, laid her hands upon the shoulders of the pair, and led them to the altar of the house, there to offer sacrifice to the ancient Roman gods. A cow, a pig, and a sheep were offered, and, while the auspex repeated the usual form of prayer, the bride and bridegroom walked round the altar hand-in-hand. The sacrifice over, the guests offered their good wishes in the cry feliriter, and the marriage-feast began. When night came on, the bride was torn, with a show of force, from the arms of her mother, and a merry procession went along with her to the bridegroom's house. Torch-bearers and flute-players led the way; whoever chose joined in; 56 . ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. the whole line rang with shouts of Talassio, perhaps the name of an old god of marriage, and with songs of no very seemly sort ; and the bridegroom scattered walnuts to the boys in the crowd, as a sign that his childish days were over. When the procession had reached the bridegroom's house, the bride anointed the door-posts and wound them round with wool; then she was lifted over the threshold to avoid the chance of an evil omen, if her foot should touch it and cause her to stumble, and Avelcomed into the atrium by her husband to share his " fire and water," the emblems of a life henceforth to be led in common. The next day there was a second marriage-feast (repotia) held in the husband's house, and the new wife brought her first offerings to the gods of the family into which she was now adopted. Henceforth she is a Roman matrona, and has all the honours and rights which the Romans gave so readily to their matrons. 4. Position of women. The married women at Rome lived in a very different fashion from those of Athens and the Ionian states of Greece. They were not shut up in the women's quarter of the house : indeed none such existed in the Roman house ; but were the honoured mistresses of the household. They span and wove with their daughters and the maid- servants (ancillae), but did no menial work, such as grinding corn or cooking. They were allowed to go out to pay visits, and to receive them; they even accompanied their husbands to the games and to the theatres \ everyone made way for them in the streets ; and anyone who insulted them was judged to be worthy of death. We often find them taking warm interest in the affairs of the country ; and their advice is asked with respect by their husbands. It was noticed at Rome, as it often has been in modern countries, that the highest standard of pure and un corrupted language and pronunciation was to be found in the daily conversation of educated ladies. The IV.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 57 writers of later times delight to dwell on the sober, grave, and simple life of the women of the earlier days; a life which, in the days of the Empire, was hardly to be found except in the homesteads of the country. But the women, like the men of Rome, were for the most part such as to call for honour and respect rather than warm affection. They were not, as we shall see immediately, as ignorant as the wives of the citizens of Athens ; but they had few ac- complishments ; and they are often spoken of as harsh and domineering. In the general decay of Roman virtue, which followed the rapid growth of the Republic in wealth and power, and the loss of their ancient faith, none suffered more than the women. Freedom passed into license; divorce was easy and extremely common ; the simplicity of the older times became reckless waste and luxury. We have some beautiful stories of the goodness and faithfulness of women, even in the bad days of the Empire ; but, as a whole, we cannot doubt that their lives and thoughts had sunk very low indeed. The Emperor Augustus made great efforts at reform. But his own example, and that of the leading men of his court, did not do much to help him ; and things went on from bad to worse for at least a century after his death. 5. The children. At first children were looked upon as entirely the property of the father; and he could do whatever he pleased with a new-born infant. But in very early times a law was made that no one should expose a son or a first-born daughter, unless it was deformed or very weakly. Still, there is no doubt that the exposure of female children was always very common. The fate of these children was often very sad. If they did not die of neglect, they were picked up by those who would keep them for a time in order to sell them afterwards as slaves. Sometimes even beggars took them, and deformed them fearfully, as we are told they do at the present day in Italy, in order to work upon the feelings of the compassionate, 58 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. and so get money by them. If a child were " taken up" by the father and reared, the mother herself in the earlier days always nursed it and took care of it. Afterwards wet-nurses (nutrices) were common. The mother, too, had the charge of the earliest education of the children. This was at first very simple ; and lay much more in training to good habits than in giving knowledge. Children were taught with care to love their country, and to reverence its laws, to be truthful and pure and honest in word and deed, to pay to the gods of the home and the state their regular dues, and, above all things, to obey without question or murmuring. When a boy grew older his father would begin to take charge of him : he kept him with him as much as possible, took him out into the fields to work, or down into the Forum to business, and taught him to ride, to swim, and to use the arms of war. At one time, we are told, the boys used to be allowed to go with their fathers into the senate-house ; but this was put a stop to, because the mothers teased the boys so much to tell them what had been dis- cussed there. The exercises taken by the boys were unlike those of the Greeks in one point. The Greeks practised always with a view to bringing the power and the beauty of the body to the highest possible pitch, and held victorious athletes in the very highest honour. But the Roman games and exercises were intended only to make men strong and skilful warriors; and it was not for beauty of form or grace of move- ment, but only for vigour and prowess in battle, that they were honoured by their fellow-citizens. So their training was such as to make them hard and strong. At first, too, the father probably taught the boy the few attainments which he would need for his after-life; a little reading, writing, and arithmetic, and some knowledge of the laws and the traditions of his country would be the utmost. But schools must have existed in Rome in very early days, for we read of Virginia going to one in the Forum in the IV.l THE ROMAN FAMILY. 59 year 450 B. c., and they are mentioned not much later in some other Italian towns. Boys and girls appear to have been taught together, but the subjects they studied can have been little more than what we have just mentioned, unless we ought to add some knowledge of singing and of the old ballads of their country. These ballads were written in the Saturnian metre, of which we have an excellent specimen in the line of our nursery song, "The queen was in her parlour, counting out her money," and were sung by boys or by the guests at feasts. But a great change in this, as in many other things, came about when the Romans, after the first Punic war, had more to do with Greece. They had indeed already learnt much from the Greeks of Lower Italy and Sicily ; but now Greeks came and settled in Rome, and found much favour with some of the leading men there, especially with Scipio and his friends. Now first literature began to be studied in schools. Perhaps the very earliest Latin school-book was a translation of Homer's Odyssey, made in the old Roman Saturnian metre by Livius Andronicus, a Greek who was the freedman of Marcus Livius, and so had taken his nomen. This was only a rough and clumsy version, but it served the purpose for which it was made, that of giving to his pupils the first access to the fresh and priceless treasures of Greek poetry. At the same time, or only a little later, lived the earliest of the Roman poets, Naevius, Ennius, and Plautus, and their works, too, were soon pressed into the service of the schools. The Greek language now was commonly studied, and Greek slaves were often bought as nurses for the children. The slave whose duty it was to watch over the boys as they went to and fro from school, and in their hours of play, to teach them good manners and to keep them from all bad company, came now to be usually a Greek, and was known by the Greek name of paedagogus. It was not expected of this slave that he should teach anything, except, perhaps, so much of 11* 6 6o ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. his own language as might be picked up by talk : as Varro says, instituit paedagogus, docet magister; and so St. Paul, in his use of the word (Gal. iii. 24) is thinking only of moral training, and not of any lessons given. But, of course, he had great influence over the character, and, therefore, careful, fathers took pains to choose the most trusty of their slaves for this office. The first school in Rome where Greek litera- ture was properly studied is said to have been opened in 197 B.C. by a Greek grammarian named Krates. He had come to Rome as the envoy of King Attalos of Pergamos, and when there had broken his leg by an accident. Being thus detained in the city, he gave public lessons in "grammar," that is to say, in our modern phrase, in literature; and these were very popular and largely attended. But before this time there had been many Greek tutors in private houses ; eminent Romans had written histories in Greek ; and the frequent jokes in the plays of Plautus, which cannot be understood without a knowledge of Greek, prove that the language must have been tolerably familiar to many, even of the poorer classes. 6. The schools in Rome. The teaching in the ordinary schools was long confined to elementary subjects, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, together with the study of literature. Livius, Naevius, and Ennius were still taught in Horace's boyhood, more than a hundred years after the death of the latest of them, when their language had already grown very old-fashioned. Cicero's speeches were used for lessons in schools, even during his life-time ; and the works of Vergil and Horace, very soon after the death of the poets, took that place as school-books which they have never lost since. But perhaps it was only in the schools of the capital that the literature of Greece was taught ; for we find that the father of Horace, who spent great pains and much money on the education of his only child, brought him, when twelve years old, from the country-town of Venusia IV.] THE ROMAN FAMIL Y. 61 to Rome to study there. Boys were sent to school first \vhen about seven years of age. They were followed, if their fathers could afford it, by slaves (capsarii) to carry their books and writing-tablets; but often they carried these themselves, as Horace tells us, and were only attended by one slave called pedis- sequus. The school was often a room on the ground- floor, open to the street, just as it is to the present day in the East. Reading was taught in a class, the boys repeating after the master in a kind of chant, first the letters, then the syllables, and then the whole word. The task of learning must have been much easier than at present, for, with rare exceptions, Latin words were pronounced exactly as they were written. But the scrawls on the walls of Pompeii show us plainly that the art of spelling was not always mastered even then. In early days books were rare and dear ; but by the time of the emperors so many well-trained slaves were kept by the booksellers for the purpose of copying them, that they seem to have been quite as cheap as the cheapest are with us. For writing boys used at first tablets covered with wax, on which the letters were marked with a pointed instrument (stilus); they began with copying over letters traced already by the master, who often guided their hands; then they tried to imitate the letters for themselves. When they had made a little progress they had to write on paper (charta) made from the papyrus plant, with ink and pens of reeds. The paper used in schools was generally such as had been already written on one side, and used for accounts or for books which had found no purchasers. Care was taken that the words set to be copied should be verses or proverbs con- taining some good lesson, just as in the heading of many of our copy-books now. Quickness of writing seems to have been more prized than neatness ; and, in the time of Cicero, a kind of shorthand came into use. Readiness at accounts, too, was also valued much, and there were special masters for arithmetic, 62 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. who taught the quickest ways of calculating bills or interest without the use of figures. 7. Punishments. The rod was in frequent use among the Roman schoolmasters fro.n the earliest times. Plautus tells -us that if a boy missed a single letter in his reading, he was soon black and blue all over, "striped just like his nurse's cloak;" and Martial speaks of it as one of the greatest nuisances of a life in the city, that before' cock-crow the air was resounding with the noise of floggings and the cries of the children in the schools. The most famous teacher of his time, Quintilian (flourished A.D. 70- 90), made an earnest protest against the custom of flogging : but a picture .from Herculaneum, belonging to the very same period, shows that the practice of "horsing," after the Eton fashion, was carried on even then. 8. School holidays. There were two regular school holidays in the year. One was in December at the time of the Saturnalia, a time of general merry- making, in which even the slaves took part; the second was in March at the Quinquatria, a festival of Minerva, extending from the igth to the 25th. The latter was regarded as the end of the school course : it was then that the boys in the schools of the city paid their yearly fees, and those who were entering brought a present (Minerval) to the master that he might offer sacrifice for them and win the favour of the goddess. In the country-schools the fees were* brought every month ; and the four months of the summer, the time for the olive harvest and the vintage, were also kept as holidays. We do not know that the same was the custom at Rome : but as the city was then, just as now, very unhealthy in August and September, it seems probable that at least the children of the wealthier citizens then went with their parents to their country-houses, or their villas by the sea. As Martial says, they learnt enough if they learnt to keep well then. IV.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 63 9. Position of the schoolmaster. The esteem in which the schoolmaster was held depended, of course, very much upon his own attainments and character. We find several cases of men who, after failing in everything else, took to teaching boys. These had, as they deserved, very little pay or credit for very hard drudgery. Often, too, men of a better stamp were only poorly rewarded. Those who were litcratores, or, as we should say, professors of literature, were expected to have at their fingers' ends every- thing that could possibly be known about all the characters in the Greek and Latin epics and tragedies, and on their way to dinner or the bath to be ready with the name of the nurse of Anchises, the native land of the daughter-in-law of Anchemolus, the years reached by Acestes, or the number of jars of wine given by the Sicilians to ^Lneas and his Trojans : and after all they could not make as much money in a year as a jockey would make by a single race. The competition among the cro\vd of Greeks that flocked into Rome as teachers was much too great to allow a very high standard of fees to be main- tained. But the case was somewhat different with the class of famous rhetoricians of whom we have next to speak. 10. Schools of rhetoric. The power of speak- ing well had always been of much account at Rome, as it must be in every free state : but no great pains had been taken to study the art of rhetoric. This was first done in Sicily, and afterwards more com- pletely at Athens, where the most famous orators and teachers of Greece lived and flourished. But when the Greek teachers of rhetoric first came to Rome they found great favour there. It was at a time when arms were no longer the only path to office and to glory, and when there were many great political trials in consequence of the bad government of the provinces by the Roman nobles (See Primer of Roman History, p. 56). So it came to be the custom for every young 64 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. Roman of good position, after he had finished his course at the school of literature, or under a private tutor, to study oratory with some Greek teacher- There were also Latin professors of rhetoric, but these were not, as a rule, much thought of. In the school of rhetoric the pupils were set to make speeches on the one side or the other of any supposed case which was given to them. Great attention was paid to the discovery of proper arguments, to the arrangement of these in the most striking order, to the choice of fitting language, including the use of figures of speech, to the control of the voice, and to the proper manage- ment of the looks and the gestures. Cicero, in his great work On the Orator, finds fault with many of the rules that were given in the schools as not sufficiently practical; but doubtless the training that was fur- nished then did much to fashion the race of orators who abounded at the close of the Republic; and Cicero himself both studied and practised most dili- gently. The proper time to join these rhetorical schools was after the dress of manhood had been put on (p. 74) ; but under the Emperors it was very common for rhetoric to be taught in ordinary schools, and for boys to stun their master's ears with their loud declaiming. ii. University education. The higher educa- tion of young Romans of wealth and position was carried on for the most part in the Greek cities of the East, and especially at Athens. This last may indeed be called the university of the Roman Empire. Long after the days of its freedom and glory had ceased, it was still the chosen home of writers and teachers from every part of the civilized world. It was there that the four great systems of philosophy, which were then most in favour, were taught by their leading men ; and to hear these lectures young Romans came in numbers. Vergil, it is true, studied philosophy, as we are told, under a Greek teacher at Rome; and one of the most charming of his IV.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 65 smaller poems tells of the joy with which he turned from the empty disputes of the schools of rhetoric, to the serious questions of philosophy. But Horace went for his higher teaching to Athens ; so did Cicero, his son, and his nephew, and, in short, almost all who could afford the time and cost of a stay there. 12. The slaves. Slavery was known from the beginning at Rome, as among ail other ancient nations of which we have any knowledge ; but in the early days of the state the slaves were by no means nu- merous. When the citizen himself, with the help of his sons, tilled the small farm on which he lived, there was little need of the aid of slaves, and little money with which to buy them. But every battle which the legions of the Republic gained added by its prisoners to the numbers of the slaves of the citizens. Then, as the wealth of the city grew, slaves were exported to Rome in abundance from foreign countries, or in later times from every province in the empire. The Romans, indeed, never sank so low as the Southern States of America did, when one part of the country bred slaves as a matter of business to supply the markets of another part. But slaves were naturally brought in numbers from the poorer parts of the Empire to the centre of its wealth and luxury. So, by degrees, they grew to unheard-of numbers. This was partly from the way in which the old yeomen of the country had become extinct, and their farms had been swallowed up in the broad estates (latifundia) of the nobles {Primer of Roman History, p. 55); partly from the growth of display and extravagance in the city. We find that, under the Empire, there was hardly a man so poor as not to have his slave : Horace speaks of himself as living extremely simply when waited upon by three slaves at dinner alone at home ; and we are told that it was not uncommon for nobles to possess ten or twenty thousand slaves, or even more than this. 13. House slaves. The household of slaves was called familia, a word so different in meaning from our 66 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. own word family that we hear in Caesar of a familia including 10,000 souls. It was generally divided into two parts, (i) familia urbana, (2) familia rustica. The familia urbana lived in the town-house of the master, and included all those slaves whom he kept for luxury and show. In the later days of the Re- public and under the Empire, these were exceedingly numerous, and had the most varied duties. One set looked after the rooms and furniture, another after the cooking and the service of the table, a third after the dresses and the toilette of the master and mistress ; then there were those whose duty it was to escort their lord whenever he appeared in public, to carry his litter, to clear the way for him through the narrow streets, to remind him of the names of acquaintances or clients, or to run his errands. But in every wealthy house were found slaves, sometimes in considerable numbers, who had received a very different training from that which was needed for the household drudges, or the train of attendants in the banqueting-hall or the forum. No small part of the business of the master was managed by his slaves, and no small part of his amusement was due to them. Slaves were trained as clerks, as secretaries, as copyists, as librarians, as readers, as actors, as singers and mu- sicians of all kinds, or as jesters. A large part of the manufacturing industry of Rome was carried on by slaves, and this proved extremely harmful to the poorer citizens, for there was but little which they could do to earn an honest livelihood. Sometimes, of course, a slave was made to do double duty : thus we hear of Atticus, the friend of Cicero, that every one of his lackeys (pedissequi) was also able to copy books and to read aloud. But cases of this kind are not very common; and, as a rule, every slave had his own office, just as in India now with the native servants, so that we can easily understand the numbers which seem to have been usual in the great Roman palaces. 14. Farm-slaves. The familia rustica, on the IV.] 7 HE ROMAN FAMILY. 67 other hand, was not kept so much for show as for profit The Romans were shrewd and skilful farmers; and knew how to get the utmost out of the labour of their slaves. At first they gave themselves up for the most part to the growth of corn ; but, when the rich corn-lands of Sicily and Africa were added to the Empire, it came to be better, just as it is in many parts of England now, to spend more pains on the breeding of cattle and sheep. The increase in the number of slaves, and in the size of estates, also helped to cause this ; for the tillage of the fields needs more careful training and constant overlooking than the tending of flocks and herds, that can roam on the hills half wild. Hence, though ploughmen and reapers were not wanting, a constantly-increasing number of the country-slaves were employed as ox-herds, shep- herds, or swine-herds. The olive and the vine formed a very valuable part of Italian agriculture, and doubt- less these were looked after, at least in part, by slaves; but probably it was here that free day-labourers found their most common employment. But often the produce of a vine-yard or an olive-ground was sold by contract, and the buyer would send his own slaves or labourers to gather it. The slave in charge of the farm was called the vilicus, and in the absence of the master he had the direction of all the work ; but often, in the case of large estates, the vilicus was under the control of a free agent (procurator) of the owner. The work of the country-slaves was naturally harder than that of the town-slaves, and their general condition was worse ; so that it was thought to be a heavy punishment for a slave to be sent from the town- house to work in the fields, just as in the Southern States of America household slaves who lost their piasters' favour were sent to the cotton plantations. 15. The treatment of slaves. The Romans seem to have treated their slaves as a rule much worse than the Greeks did. It is true that the Greeks were often cruelly thoughtless as to the work 68 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. they expected from their slaves, and quite without any sense of the claims of a common kinship of man to man. But if they did not use them any better than they did their horses, at least they did not use them worse. But the Roman was by nature hard and unpitying ; he never spared himself any pain or hardship in doing his duty, and he certainly never dreamt of sparing his slaves. The Greek was for- bidden by law to kill a slave or to treat him with positive cruelty. The Roman master could do with a slave exactly what he pleased, as much as with any other piece of his property. It is true that we have one case on record in which the action of the master was checked. In the time of Augustus a wealthy Roman, whose name was Vedius Pollio, was fond of keeping lampreys, and whenever a slave of his displeased him, he had him thrown to feed these fish. Once when the Emperor was dining with Pollio, a slave was clumsy enough to break a crystal goblet, and orders were given at once that he should be thrown into the pond as usual. Augustus begged for his forgiveness ; his master refused to grant it ; and then the Emperor, angry at the obstinacy of Pollio, and shocked, we may hope, at his cruelty, ordered every one of his goblets to be broken, and the fish- ponds to be all filled up. But we may conceive of the state of things when atrocities like these were punished so lightly, and then, as it seems, only be- cause of the accident of the Emperor's presence. In the earlier and simpler days, things were in some respects hardly so bad, because the slave was regarded as one of the family, eat and drank with the master, though indeed at a different table, and shared his daily work. On the other hand, if there was less of barbarous cruelty, there was more of unfeeling hardness. By the time of the Emperors the gentler teaching of the Greek philosophy had had much effect upon the better class of Romans. Cato, a perfect pattern of the stern old Roman farmer (Primer of IV.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 69 History ', p. 53), had a maxim that a slave ought always to be at work or asleep. Even on holidays (feriae) he found all kinds of work for his slaves to do. If any of them were ill, it was a sign that they had been eating too much. He tells a farmer to sell at once worn-out cattle, diseased sheep, broken carts and tools, aged and sick slaves, and other useless things. Plutarch, the Greek philosopher, who wrote a life of Cato 250 years after his death, says of this : "In my judgment it marks an over-rigid temper for a man to take the work out of his servants as out of brute beasts, turning them off and selling them in their old age, and thinking that there ought to be no further commerce between man and man, than whilst there arises some profit from it. ... As to myself, I would not so much as sell my draught ox on the account of his age, much less for a small piece of money sell a poor old man, and so chase him, as it were, from his own country, by turning him not only out of the place where he had lived a long while, but also out of the manner of living he had been accustomed to, and that more especially when he would be as useless to the buyer as to the seller." And yet, in spite of this better teaching, it is in the days of Plutarch that we hear of the most numerous and most horrible stories of cruelty to slaves. If men knew better then what they ought to do, they were slower to do it. In his time it was a common saying that a man had as many enemies as he had slaves. We cannot wonder at this, when we hear of the way in which they were often treated. In many parts of the country it was the custom for them to work in chains. At night they were shut up in large barracks (ergastula) partly under-ground, lit only by small windows, so high that they could not look out of them. Even in Rome it was the custom for the porter to be chained at the door like a dog. In the great houses there was a slaye (silentiarius) whose duty it was to keep strict silence 70 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. among his fellow-slaves, and the slightest sound, even a cough or a sneeze, was punished with blows. They were fed on the coarsest food : Cato says that in addition to their monthly rations of corn they are to have a few fallen olives, which are to be made to go as far as possible; when these are all used, they may have a little salt fish and vinegar. Even their poor allowances were often cut down for his own profit by the vilicus. A cloak and a pair of wooden shoes were given them once in two years ; a tunic once a year. It is a sign of the economy which more than anything marked the Roman farmer, that old clothes had to be returned to the vilicus, who had them made into patch-work quilts (centones). The punishments were numerous and cruel. For slight offences slaves were beaten with a rod (virga) or a bundle of elm-twigs (ulrnei), answering to our birch; severer punishment was inflicted by a whip (scutica) or thong (lorum) like the American cow- hide ; and the worst of all was the scourge (flagrum or flagellum) made of knotted cords, with pieces of bone or even hooks (stimuli) inserted to tear the flesh. We cannot wonder that slaves sometimes died under the blows of this horrible instrument That they might not be able to wince or struggle, they were often hung up with weights fastened to their feet. Another punishment was the furca, a V-shaped piece of wood placed on the neck of the slave, to the ends of which his arms were tied. Death was but rarely inflicted, because of the value of a slave as a piece of property ; the usual method was by crucifixion, one of the most painful forms that can be imagined. If we may believe the Roman writers, the mistresses were even more cruel to their women- slaves than their masters were, and punished them pitilessly for the slightest offences. The state of slaves was in one respect more hopeless in Rome than in Greece ; for it was hardly possible for them to make their escape. Where there were many little states j v< j THE ROMAN FAMILY. 71 bordering on each other, it was not very difficult for a slave to run away from one into another, and though in times of peace they might be recovered, in war-time it was not so. Thus we hear that when the Spartans took possession of Deceleia, a fortress in Attica, 20,000 slaves fled to them, and gained their freedom. But in a great empire like Rome this was impossible. As soon as a slave ran away, a full description of him was placarded in the neighbouring towns and proclaimed by the public crier, a reward was offered for his restoration, and no one dared to help or hide him. When he was caught, he was branded on the forehead with F for fugitivus (run- away), and sent to work for years, or it might be for life, in chains. There is still at Rome a collar which was worn on the neck by a slave, who had run away, with the inscription : " Fugi : tene me : cum revocaveris me d(omino) m(eo) Zoninoaccipis solidum," i.e., about seventeen shillings. 1 6. The freedmen. The life of a slave in the familia rustica was thus as hopeless as we could imagine. All his days he toiled for the scantiest food and the most miserable lodging, always exposed to the blows of a cruel master, or a still more cruel bailiff, a slave like himself. His only chance of free- dom was by escaping to the woods and becoming a bandit, or by joining in one of those risings which were common when the bondage grew too bitter to be borne, and which were put down by the Romans, when- ever they happened, with merciless severity. But a town-slave had a somewhat better prospect. If his master was kindly, the slave was allowed to keep his own little savings (peculium), and in time he might buy his freedom. Often, too, an owner would set slaves free either during his life-time or by his will at death. If he had taken the proper steps they then became Roman citizens; and, though they were always looked down upon as freedmen (libertini), they might rise in time to any place in the state which 7* ROMAN ANTIQUITIES [CHAP. their talents might gain for them. Now the slaves at Rome did not always belong to an inferior race, like the negroes in America. They were often clever and well-taught Greeks, in many ways more able than their Roman masters. So, under the Empire we find them rising to great wealth and power by the favour of the Emperors. Some were made governors of provinces, others commanded fleets, and more than once we find the city of Rome itself, in the absence of the Emperor, placed under the unlimited power of one of his freed- men. But, of course, the great majority of freedmen always remained the poor dependents of their former masters, ready for the most part to do their bidding, good or evil, living on their bounty, or on the free distribution of corn by the state, and swelling the numbers of the lazy and debased rabble which thronged the streets of Rome. Slavery is always one of the greatest curses that can plague a country ; but in Rome all that makes it such a curse was to be found at its height ; and in many more ways than we have room now to tell of, it proved the ruin of the state. 17. Materials of dress. A Roman of the time of the Republic was dressed almost entirely in woollen cloth. Linen was not unknown, for flax was grown in various parts of Italy, and it was spun and woven into cloth for various household purposes. Some of the Italian tribes even wore linen dresses like the Ionian Greeks (Greek Antiquities, p. 28). But at Rome linen was only used for the short drawers (subligacula) or bandages worn round the loins, and for pocket hand- kerchiefs. Cotton was perhaps only known in the form of Indian muslins (carbasa), which were imported in the later times, but were always rare luxuries. Silk was not commonly used until the days of the later Emperors. But even under the Republic silken stuffs were brought from the East, and sometimes worn by women. As early as the time of Aristotle, who died B.C. 322, the worms were brought in caravans from China to the island of Cos, and there manufactured iv.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 73 into very thin and almost transparent garments, called Coae vestes. Afterwards the same kind of goods was made in Rome ; and imitations of them in fine linen were common. But down to the times of the Em- perors we must fancy both men and women at Rome, as a rule, always dressed in woollen stuffs. 18. Dress of the men. The proper dress of a Roman man was the toga. This was a large piece of cloth, usually about fifteen feet long and ten feet broad ; and hence it was not so square as the Greek cloak or mantle. The corners seem to have been rounded off, so as to give it something of an oval shape. When it was to be put on it was folded in two lengthwise, but not quite along the middle, so that one fold was broader than the other. Then one end was thrown over the left shoulder, so as nearly to touch the ground in front ; the longer half was brought from behind under the right shoulder, leaving this bare, and again thrown over the left shoulder, making a fold in front of the breast, and leaving a loose end hanging down over the back. The folds of the toga were arranged with great care, so as to cover the right side as completely as possible, and to hang gracefully in front of the body. Finally, the end which had first been hanging down under the folds seems to have been brought out, and tucked into them, so as to hold the whole together, and to keep it in its proper place. In the earliest days this toga was the only garment worn by citizens over the subligaculum ; it seems to have been worn by men and women alike, both by day and by night. Even in later times candidates serving for office, and lovers of the old customs, like the younger Cato, were dressed in this way. But HI time it came to be the custom to wear under this a kind of shirt called tunica. The tunic was made of two pieces sewn together up the sides. It had either no sleeves at all, or very short ones; to wear a tunic with sleeves reaching down to the wrists was looked upon in the time of Cicero as a 74 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. sign of effeminacy, though afterwards these became usual. Often a closely-fitting vest with sleeves, called subucula, was worn under the tunic. Sometimes more than one tunic was used. The Emperor Augustus, who suffered much from cold, is said to have worn in the winter-time four tunics under his toga, besides the subucula. The tunic, like the toga, was always of white woollen cloth ; but senators had a broad purple stripe running down the front of the tunic, and knights, that is, wealthy citizens, had two narrow stripes of the same kind. The toga was still the proper out-of-door dress for the citizen (See frontispiece). It was always worn in the forum and the streets of the city ; its use was for- bidden to slaves and to strangers ; and Roman boys, who when they were young wore a toga with a purple hem to it (toga praetexta), at about the age of seven- teen were taken down by their fathers and their friends to the forum, there to make their appearance in the white toga, and to enrol themselves as Roman citizens. Hence Vergil speaks of the Romans as " lords of the world, the people that wear the toga." But the toga was a cumbrous garment, and so its use came to be more and more limited to formal occasions. The poorer classes were generally content with the tunic alone; but in cold or wet weather they wore over this the paenula, a sleeveless cloak fastened down the front, fitting somewhat close to the body, and made for the most part of a dark thick cloth, like frieze, or of leather. A looser cloak of the same kind, which left the arms more free, was called the sagum this was worn especially by soldiers, or by husband- men. A red sagum worn by generals was known as the paludamentum. The lacerna, often worn by wealthier people, was a finer kind of sagum, some- times provided with a hood (cucullus), and large enough to be worn over the toga. As this might be of bright colours, it was sometimes used merely for the sake of ornament ; but in the time of Cicero IV.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 75 it was thought hardly respectable to do this, and Augustus expressly forbad it to be worn in the forum. The laena was in shape like the sagutn, but it was properly made of a kind of frieze like the paemda: in later times, however, it seems to have been some- times of fine purple stuff. All these were garments for out of doors. Indoors nothing seems to have been worn over the tunic, as a rule, except at dinner-parties, when a gay-coloured and, at the same time, easy dress called the synthesis was used. The favourite colours for this were scarlet, purple, sky-blue, violet, and green. 19. The dress of the women. The proper dress of the Roman matron was the stola. This was a long tunic reaching to the feet, with short sleeves, girded round the waist, and having a flounce or hem (instita) at the bottom edge. Under this were worn an under tunic (subucula) and a close-fitting vest (fascia). The usual wrap for out of doors was the palla. Where a stola was worn, the pa/la seems to have been thrown round the body in much the same way as the toga. But girls and foreign women, who did not wear a stola, arranged their palla much like the Dorian chiton of the Greeks (Greek Antiquities, p. 46). The square white cloth was folded along one side, so that about one-third of it was double, then this was clasped over the shoulders, so that the doubled part hung down over the breast ; the left side was closed by the fold of the robe, except that the left arm was allowed to pass out between the top of the dress and the clasp : the right side was open except so far as the clasp and girdle confined it. But while the Dorian girls wore nothing but the chiton, the Roman girls always had also an under tunic. 20. Coverings for the head and feet. In ordinary life hats were never worn either by men 01 women. On a journey men wore broad-brimmed hats (petasus, causia) to keep off the sun ; and similar hats were worn in the open theatre for the same 12* ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAK Fig. 6. Handmaidc.i v.-e?.r!nj a sleeved siola. and palla, dressing a bride, who wean a tufiica with open sleeves, a itola. with the instita, and a light palla. IV.] THE ROMAN FA MIL Y. 77 purpose, when it was too windy to put up the usual awning. These hats were borrowed, like their names, from the Greek. The native Roman pileus, a close- fitting felt cap, appears to have been used only by slaves and artisans. Women always wore a veil when they went abroad ; and we hear of one Roman who divorced his wife for having appeared without it. But it did not cover the face, like the veils that are worn in the East at the present time. It was probably from the frequent exposure to the sun without any protection that the Romans suffered so often from weak eyes, just as is the case at the present day in Egypt. The shoes (calcei) were an important article of dress, and differed with the rank of the person wear- ing them. Consuls wore the red mulleus ; senators a black shoe fastened with four thongs, and adorned with a silver crescent on the instep ; ordinary citizens a black shoe not unlike our own. The poorer classes and the slaves wore wooden shoes, like the sabots of the French peasantry, or the clogs so common in Lancashire. But the calceus was, as a rule, only worn with the toga. Indoors it was usual to wear not shoes, but sandals (soleae) : these consisted of a sole of leather, fastened on by a thong, passing between the great toe and the second, and joining another thong, which came from the other end of the sole round the ankle. But at dinner even these were laid aside, and the guests reclined bare-footed (see p. 29). 21. Ornaments. The men were accustomed to wear at most a finger-ring. In the earliest days this was of iron ; afterwards the senators, and at a later time the wealthy gentlemen (e quite s), had rings of gold ; and by the days of the Empire it came to be common to wear many rings at a time, set with precious stones, which were often carved very beauti- fully. These were employed as seals; a great many of them have come down to us, and are valued very highly. The ladies of Rome, on the other hand, ;3 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. delighted in the most various kinds of ornaments, adorned with all manner of jewels. Necklaces, ear- rings, bracelets, brooches, chains, and rings displayed the fortunes of the wearers, and often exhausted the purses of their husbands. Of precious stones the diamond was even then the most highly valued, but we hear also of enormous prices paid for pearls and emeralds. The children of free parents wore on their necks a round or heart-shaped locket (bulla) of gold, which was laid aside with the toga praetexta when they reached the age of manhood. This was intended not only as an ornament, but also as a charm to keep away " the evil eye ; " and those who could not afford a golden bulla wore in its place a knot of leather. 22. The beard and hair. We may notice that the Romans in early times allowed the beard and hair to grow. The first who brought daily shaving into fashion was Scipio Africanus ; from his time down to that of the Emperor Hadrian, it was usual to cut the hair short and to shave the beard and whiskers ; but Hadrian suffered his beard to grow in order to hide some scars on his face, and his courtiers followed his example. To the custom of shaving there were, however, four exceptions : the poorer classes were not able to spare the time for daily visits to the barbers' shops; the young dandies of Cicero's time preferred their beards trimmed, rather than shaven, and hence he calls them bene barbati ; philosophers, and sometimes poets, were accustomed to wear beards as a sign of their profession ; and all classes let their hair and beard grow in time of mourning. The beard was trimmed (tondere) or shaven (radere) with a razor (novaculd) in the barbers' shops, which were at Rome, as they have always been in Italy, favourite places for a lounge or a gossip. 23. The funerals. The place of pride and honour held by a worthy citizen of Rome was never shown more strikingly than in the rites of his funeral. IV.] THE ROMAN FAMILY. 79 As soon as the breath appeared to have left his body, his eyes were closed by his nearest relative ; and all who were present joined in a shout, calling him by his name (condamabatur}. If his silence proved his death, the last duties were paid to his corpse. The undertakers (libitinarii], who had their office at the temple of Venus Libitina, were ordered to prepare a funeral, and in front of the house a cypress or a pine was planted, that no one might enter it unaware of the death, and the consequent pollution. The corpse was laid in state in the atrium with its feet to the doorway, robed in the toga, either plain or with the purple border of the magistrate, according to the rank of the deceased. When the day of the funeral had come, a crier (praeco) summoned the people to be present in a set form of words : " Yonder citizen (Qm'ris) is dead; if any one can follow him {e.g., L. Titius, the son of Lucius] to the grave, the hour has come : he is now being borne from his house." The burial took place, not before daybreak as at Athens, but at any hour of the day that was convenient. The procession was opened by pipers, trumpeters, and horn-blowers, playing alternately notes of sadness, and rousing strains in honour of the dead man's glory. Then followed mourning-women (prae- ficae), hired to chant a dirge (nenia) of lament for the departed. In the later days actors took part in the solemnity, reciting appropriate passages from poets, and strangely enough to modern notions indulging in jests and buffoonery. Then came, in the case of a noble, by far the most striking part of the pro- cession. Of every ancestor who had held any curule office, there were preserved in niches along the walls of the family atrium waxen masks (imagines) blackened by time, but still preserving the memory of their features. At a funeral actors were hired to wear these, and to walk or ride in procession, dressed in the robes which each had worn in his lifetime, and followed by a train of lictors. It seemed as though 8o ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. the honoured ancestors of the house had risen from their grave to escort their descendant to the tomb. Then followed the corpse on his bier, surrounded by the trophies he had won in war, or in peaceful contests. The children, the relatives, the friends, the clients, and the freedmen attended it dressed in mourning, the men with their heads veiled, the women on this occasion only appearing without the veil. So the train passed on to the Forum; the corpse was placed in front of the rostra; the figures of the ancestors formed a semi-circle around it, seated on their curule chairs; and a son or the nearest kins- man of the dead man told of the exploits of those whose faces were there before him, and lastly of the manner in which the departed had fulfilled the duties of the son of such a house. The procession was formed again, and moved on out of the city-gates along one of the great high-roads. Beyond the walls of the city, by the side of the family tomb, the funeral pile was already erected. The corpse was placed upon it, sprinkled with odours, and crowned with ga r lands, as the last token of affection. Then with averted eyes the nearest kinsman applied a torch to the pile, and the flames rose into the air amidst the wailing of the mourners and the notes of the horns and pipes. When the pile was burnt to the ground, the ashes of the corpse were gathered and quenched with wine. Then they were dried in cloths, en- closed in a funeral urn, and placed in a niche in the sepulchre. The mourners were sprinkled thrice with purifying water by a priest, and dismissed with the solemn Ilicet (you may go). The last farewell (vale) was uttered, and the train returned to the city. A funeral feast (silicerniuni) was held at first by the side of the grave, but afterwards at the house of the departed; and games, especially combats of gladi- ators, were given in honour of his memory. Often the corpse was buried in a coffin (ana) instead of being burnt ; but in oiher respects the rites were the same. V.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE. 81 In the case of the poor, of course, the funeral was very much simpler; they were buried in a public burial-ground on the Esquiline hill, and, to save ex- pense, the ceremonies were often performed at night. CHAPTER V. THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE. i. Life in the City. We have tried to picture to ourselves the Roman in his home ; we have seen him at his meals, his bath, and his exercise ; we have tried to learn something of his wife, his children, and his slaves. Now we have to follow him out into his life in the city ; and try to see something of his intercourse with his fellow-citizens. But we must not fail to notice, in the first place, that public affairs held a much less prominent place in the life of a middle-class citizen, or one of the lower orders of Rome, than they did in a Greek town like Athens. I do not say, a less important place; doubtless, in the great struggle be- tween the patricians and the plebeians (Primer of Roman History, pp. 13-19), party spirit ran very high; and, as nobles and commons alike were contending for something which each cared very much about, the meetings of the citizens and the elections of the magis- trates were, of course, matters of the greatest interest. But the Romans never cared much for discussion in itself; and except when there was something of much importance to themselves to be talked about in the forum, they were content to leave the general direction of affairs to their leading statesmen (see p. 9). The law-courts, too, which gave so much occupation to the Athenian citizens (Greek Antiquities, p. 91), were carried on, as we shall see afterwards, either without any juries at all, or with juries taken wholly from the richer classes. Then, again, life in the city was much less liked than in Greece ; in the olden days, especi- ally, a great number of the citizens lived on their farms ten or twenty miles from Rome, and they 82 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. did not come into the town except for important business. The chief occasions which brought them there were the meetings (comitia) of the people, held to elect magistrates, to pass laws, or to decide upon peace or war. Of these meetings there were three kinds : to one, the comitia curiata, the patricians alone were admitted; to the second, the comitia cen- turiata, all the citizens were allowed to come, but when matters came to a vote, they were arranged in such a way that the older and richer men had much more weight in the voting than the younger and poorer men ; to the third, the comitia tributa, all the citizens came, and they voted in divisions, not according to their wealth or age, but according to the part of the country in which each man had his land. It seems that at first, just as in our own county-ele'ctions in the old days, no one was allowed to vote even in the comitia tributa who had not some land of his own; but afterwards this restric- tion was done away with. The changes in the powers of these assemblies must be read in the history of Rome. What is most important for us now to notice is that before the end of the Republic, their chief real business came to lie in the election of magistrates. The Romans unfortunately never hit upon the notion, which alone has made government by the people possible in any large country, that of choosing re- presentatives to discuss and to resolve in their behalf. It was natural enough, when the government of Rome extended only over the city itself and the country a few miles around it, for every citizen to have the right to appear in person to speak and vote in the assemblies of the people. But when Roman citizens were to be found scattered through every part of Italy, it was plain that the meetings could only be attended by a very small part of them. Hence power fell largely into the hands of those who lived in the city or very near to it. Then a practice came up of holding not regular assemblies (comitia), but meetings v.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE. 83 (contiones), in which, just as in our own public meet- ings, any one who pleased, citizen or foreigner, slave or free, might take his place, and applaud or hiss as he pleased. There were not many who had the courage of the younger Scipio, when hooted in a contio at Rome. "Be silent," he cried, "you step- children of Italy. Do you think I will fear those whom I myself sent in chains to the slave-market." And thus the leading men of the time made it their aim to gain the support of the "public opinion" of the "rabble of the market-place," as Cicero calls them ; and the greatest affairs of state were decided by the pressure which men of influence were thus enabled to bring to bear upon the authorities. We can easily understand, then, that all serious discussion of politics became impossible for respectable quiet citizens ; and these were undoubtedly glad when, under the Empire, the meetings of the people were deprived of all real power, and reduced to a mere formality. 2. Elections. But in the time of Cicero and Caesar there was still the greatest interest taken in elections. The reason for this was two-fold. In the first place, the old distinction between patricians and plebeians had quite died out, at least for all practical purposes. A new class of nobles (nobiles) had sprung up consisting of those whose fathers or forefathers had held high office in the state. To be elected to one of the more important magistracies meant for a man himself admission to the senate, and for his children admission to the ranks of this new nobility. And then, again, the provinces of Rome were governed entirely by nobles sent out by the senate, after their year of office as consul or praetor was over. These governors, even when just and honest, had many op- portunities of adding to their wealth ; and when, as was far too often the case, they were inclined to extortion and corruption, there was hardly any limit to the plunder which they could wring out of the 84 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. unhappy provincials. The only check upon them was the danger of a prosecution for misgovernment after their return ; but the courts which had to try them were so corrupt, that bribery would almost al- ways secure the acquittal of the worst offenders. We hear of one Roman noble who said that he wanted to keep the government of his province for three years : in the first he would make enough money to pay the debts he had incurred in gaining his office ; in the second he would make enough to bribe his judge to acquit him after his return ; in the third he would gain a fortune to suffice for the rest of his life. Now, however much the people allowed them- selves to be guided in politics by their favourite leaders, they always kept in their own hands the elections, for the sake of what they would get by them. In the days when Rome was fighting for her very life with enemies like Pyrrhus, the Samnites, or Hannibal, there was little fear that the armies of the state should be entrusted to men who were not be- lieved to be brave and skilful leaders. Once, indeed, we hear that the magistrate who was presiding at an election refused to accept the votes of the people for a candidate whom he thought to be unfit, and bade them go back and vote for some one better. But, as the Empire grew, and her danger from enemies seemed to be less, the choice of the people was decided mostly by the popularity of the candidate, a popu- larity often gained, or at least secured by bribery. Not long after the Second Punic War it was needful to pass a law against bribing. But it was found to be quite impossible to put the practice down, so long as the rich men were willing to buy the votes of the people, and the people were willing to sell them. Law after law was passed, each more severe than the last; but the only result was that more ingenious devices were invented to elude them ; and bribery was never so bad as in the closing days of the Republic. 3. The canvass. When a Roman desired elec- y.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE, 85 tion to a magistracy, it was necessary for him to go round (ambire) to ask for votes. This was called ambitus, or ambitio, whence, with a slight change of meaning, our word ambition. He used to appear in the forum, the Campus Martins, and other places of public resort, with his toga newly whitened (Candida), and hence he was called candidatus. Accompanied by friends of influence (deductores), and followed by a number of clients or poor citizens (sectatores),hewent about shaking hands with the voters (prensatio), and begging for their support. A nomenclator attended him to tell him the names of any that he might not know, so that he might be able to address them properly. When the Roman franchise was extended over the whole of Italy (Primer of Roman History, pp. 64-65), it became necessary sometimes to travel through the country-towns to secure the votes of the citizens there, and Cicero, when standing for the consulship, even thought of going for this purpose to the colonies in Cisalpine Gaul. Of course a man would generally expect the support of his own fellow-townsmen and neighbours, whose favour he had courted by giving them feasts, and by similar acts of liberality. Treating the citizens generally was forbidden by several laws, though these were often evaded. But it was common enough to give shows, games, and banquets before a man formally became a candidate, often while he still held some lower office. The aedileship gave the best opportunities for this ; because it was the duty of the aedile to look after most of the public games (p. 96), and so he had a chance of spending much more than the state furnished to defray their expenses; but sometimes a praetor did the same. 4. The voting. The day for the election was fixed by the magistrate who had to preside, acting, as a rule, in accordance with the wishes of the senate. The comitia centuriata, which elected the higher magis- trates, always met in the Campus Martins, outside the city walls j the comitia tributa, which elected the 86 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. tribunes and the aediles, as well as the less im- portant magistrates, usually met in the same place, but sometimes in the Forum or the Circus. The Campus Martius was divided into pens (saepta), into which the tribes or centuries passed to record their votes. At first an officer was placed at the entrance of each pen to ask the citizens for whom they gave their votes ; and the votes were scored to the candi- dates by pricking a mark (punctum) on a tablet over against their names, so that punctttm ferre in Horace means " to gain a vote : " but afterwards a law was made that votes should be given by ballot, and then every voter received a blank tablet (tabella) on which he wrote the name of the candidate for whom he voted. The votes were counted, and the result announced by the presiding officer. 5. Honours of the magistrates. How the Romans came to have their different kinds of magis- trates, and what the powers of each were, has been told already in the Primer of Roman History. But perhaps it will enable us to imagine better the life of Rome in the time of Cicero, if something is said here of the honours which the magistrates received. The special mark of magisterial power was the attendance of the lictors. These were officers who walked one by one before the magistrate to clear the way for him through the crowded streets, and to do his bidding. They were always dressed in the national toga, and in their left hands, resting on their shoulders, they carried the famous fasces. These were bundles of elm-rods fastened around an axe; and were at once the signs of the magistrate's right to flog and behead offenders, and the instruments with which the punish- ment was inflicted. Only, within the walls of the city no magistrate was allowed to have the power of life and death over the citizens ; and as a sign of this, the axe was removed from the fasces when- ever the lictors appeared in the streets of Rome. The consuls, and any one who was appointed with V.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE. 87 the power of a consul (pro consule) to command an army or to govern a province, had twelve lictors each. A praetor had six, as a rule, but when in Rome he had only two. An aedile was not attended by any, unless he was acting as judge; and we are surprised to learn that none were allowed to what was in some respects the highest of Roman magistracies, the censorship. Then the magistrates had also their own seatsof honour the higher magistrates a sella curulis originally a seat placed in a car (ci.rnts), but after- wards, as it became more difficult to drive through the streets of Rome, simply a seat of a particular form (p. 31), the plebeian tribunes a bench (sub- sellium) on which they sat together. We have many stories to show us that it was looked upon as the special right of a magistrate to sit, while the citizens stood in his presence. The dress of the magistrates has been spoken of above : but we may add that a victorious general in a triumph not only wore the embroidered purple toga (toga picta), and a tunic adorned with figures worked in gold (tunica palmata), but also carried in his hand an ivory sceptre, having at the top an eagle, the sacred bird of Jupiter, and wore on his head a chaplet of bay-leaves. 6. The law-courts. In the earliest days the king was looked upon as the father of the nation ; and he had the same power over all the citizens that the father had over the members of his family. He punished wrong acts done to the state as a whole, or to some particular member of it, according to his own ideas of justice ; and if his power over wrong- doers was in any way limited, it was only by the customs of his forefathers, which had for him the force of law. He might allow an appeal from his judgment to the citizens assembled in public meeting ; but there is no reason to believe that he was obliged to grant the appeal. In cases of light offences he decided the amount of the fine to be paid to the injured citizen : where the offence was graver, he 88 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. might shut out the criminal from the sacred circle of the citizens, declare him devoted (sacer) to the gods below, and put him to death in the way which seemed to him best; this varied with the nature of his crime. He might call in the counsel of some of the older citizens (senatores), or even commit the trial of a case to deputies chosen from among them. There seem to have been also two " trackers of murder" (quaestores paricidii), whose duty it was to hunt up and to bring to trial murderers, and probably other criminals also. After the expulsion of the kings, their right of judging in trials passed over to the consuls ; but by one of the earliest laws of the Re- public it was provided that there should be an appeal to the whole body of citizens, whenever the life of any citizen was in danger. At the same time it came to be the custom that the consul should assign the duty of looking after trials to other citizens who acted as his deputies. We must now take care to dis- tinguish more clearly between what are known in modern law as civil and criminal offences. The line was not drawn between the two quite in the same way as at present, but we may say generally that the first group included offences for which private citizens sought redress, and the second included all that were punished by the magistrates as wrongs against the state. Now for criminal offences the quaestores were the judges, especially in cases of capital charges, that is, cases concerning a citizen's caput, his place in the commonwealth; for it must be remembered that a citizen lost his caput as much if he were struck off the roll of citizens as if his head were struck off his shoulders. It seems that at first they were regarded as the representatives of the royal or consular au- thority, and therefore an appeal lay from them to the assembly of the people. Then the case was discussed at three several meetings, and only at the fourth a vote was taken whether the magistrate's decision should be confirmed or not But, in course of time, V.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE. 89 a change in their position came about. The process of appeal to the people was very clumsy and incon- venient as the state grew in numbers. The quaestors, who were now elected by the people, came to be looked upon as acting on their behalf; hence, aided by a council (consilium) of senators, they enquired into any charge which was brought before them, and gave their sentence upon it; and this sentence was looked upon as the judgment of the people speaking through the mouths of their appointed officers, so that there was no further appeal from it. Then followed another change, which has misled many writers as to the real position of the quaestors. The penalties im- posed by the quaestors were often fines ; and the money thus raised they had to take charge of for the service of the state ; afterwards other sources of income were also committed to their care ; and, as the state grew richer, their financial duties became the greatest part of their work. Again, as wars were now waged at a greater distance, and the quaestors had to be present with the armies as paymasters, this inter- fered with their duty as judges. So for a while it was the custom to appoint special commissioners, also called quaestors, to examine on behalf of the people any important charges, and to pronounce sentence as seemed fit to their consilium. But this plan also became unfit for general use as the numbers of the citizens increased, and, instead of appointing a special commissioner and consilium for every case, standing commissions (quaestiones perpetuae) were esta- blished. The first of these was appointed in B.C. 149, to try governors who had oppressed their provinces ; and afterwards several others were created to deal each with a particular kind of offence. These were really representatives of the general assembly of the people, and so there was no appeal from their verdict. At first the members of the commission were always chosen from the senators ; it was one of the reforms of Gaius Gracchus to have them chosen from the rich 90 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. traders who were called knights (equites) ; but, after several changes, it was finally settled that they should be taken partly from the senators, partly from the knights, and partly from a body of minor officials called tribuni aerarii. The president of the quaestio was properly one of the praetors ; but, as the number of commissions grew, the place of a praetor was often taken by a deputy, called the iudex quaestionis. Any citizen might appear as a prosecutor ; and it was very common for a young and aspiring man, who wished to practise eloquence and to make a name for himself in politics, to prosecute the governor of a province for extortion, or a candidate for office for bribery. The elder men confined themselves for the most part to pleading on behalf of accused friends and connexions ; hence almost all the speeches of Cicero delivered in the law-courts, except those in which, at the be- ginning of his career, he prosecuted Verres, are speeches in defence of some one. Any citizen was allowed to plead in defence of the accused, and we sometimes find three or four advocates (patroni) taking part in a trial. There was a law against paying any fees to an advocate ; but it seems to have been often eluded ; and successful advocacy was a means of rising, not only to influence and power, but also to considerable wealth. The voting was taken by ballot ; the sentence of the court was in most cases that the guilty man should be "forbidden fire and water," i.e., should be banished from Italy and cease to be a citizen of Rome. The standing commissions were, of course, only suited for the punishment of graver offences. A summary jurisdiction like that of our police-magistrates was given in cases of less importance to the triumviri capitales. These were at first officers appointed by the consuls or the praetor to look after the safety of the city by night, to arrest thieves and burglars, and to provide against the frequent fires. At this time they were called triumviri iwcturni. But afterwards V.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE. 91 they were elected by the people, and receive -\ judicial powers. In the case of slaves and strangers they could punish by their own authority; and in the Forum there was a 'pillar called the Columna Maenia, at which such criminals were flogged by the servants of the triumvirs, while a crier stood by proclaiming their offences. Where citizens were concerned, or where the charges were graver, they apparently only prepared the case for a higher tribunal, like our magis- trates when they commit a prisoner for trial at the assizes. 7. Civil suits. When one citizen wished to sue another for any wrong that had been done him per- sonally, the courts and the proceedings were entirely different from those which have just been described. It would not be possible here to go into the many details of the Roman private law ; although the study is a very interesting one, and also one of great im- portance, seeing that the ideas of the Romans on questions like property, inheritance, and contract have influenced very greatly the laws of almost every civilized country. But perhaps it may be possible to give some notion of the way in which suits were generally conducted. We have seen how, in criminal matters, the power of judgment lay with the king, and then with the consuls, and how a deputy usually acted on their behalf, and tried the whole of the case. Now, in private or civil actions, the case was some- what different. The action was divided into two different parts. In the first part the presiding magis- trate, who in later times was always the praetor, had simply to see that the suit was brought in the proper form : then he referred it to an umpire (iudex), who had to enquire into all questions of fact, and pronounce his decision accordingly. The first part of the suit was said to be in iure ; the second in iudicio. In the early days of the Republic a suitor had to word his claim in exact accordance with certain phrases found in the laws : for instance, we read of a man who 13* 92 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. brought an action for damages done by a neighbour to his vines, but who was cast in his suit because the law under which he was prosecuting did not mention vines, but trees. Now, the knowledge of the words of the laws, and therefore of the proper phrases for actions, was at first kept secret by the patricians ; so that the commons could not even sue for redress in the legal form with- out obtaining their assistance. This lasted for two hundred years after the expulsion of the kings ; and was only put a stop to when Gnaeus Flavins, the clerk of the famous censor Appius Claudius, with or without his master's approval, wrote out a list of the proper forms, and published them in the forum. Not long after this time there was a great reform in the manner of trying cases; and whereas the plaintiff had pre- viously been obliged to choose out the proper state- ment of his case (legis actio) on his own responsibility, now the praetor on hearing the complaint would himself put the issue, as we should call it, into a formula, so that it was fit for trial. The oldest form of procedure was said to be Sacramento; in this the two parties each staked in the hands of the court a certain sum, varying with the amount of the property in dispute, as a pledge (sacramentum) that his state- ment was true. Then the trial went on, and the umpire gave his decision : the winner recovered his deposit, but the loser forfeited his, which went to pay the expenses of the court. Other methods were also in use, but the main feature of all is that the presiding magistrate lays down the law which bears upon the case, and sees that the suit is in proper shape for trial, and then refers it to an umpire to decide which of the parties is right in his statements as to the facts. Sometimes, when the case was a difficult one, the praetor would send it not before a single umpire, but before the court of the Hundred (centumviri), who seem to have been elected by the people to help him in important cases. When a Roman citizen was engaged in a suit with a foreigner, V.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE, 93 it was brought before a small special court, called the recuperatores: their proceedings were free from all the tedious formalities of an ordinary suit ; and so it often happened that Roman citizens preferred to submit their suits to this body of judges. It will be seen from what has been said that the Roman law-courts had all that practical character which we might have expected from the nature of the people. In great criminal cases undoubtedly they often broke down badly. The juries were either unduly lenient, because they were taken from the same class as the accused ; or else they were open to bribes in the most unblushing fashion; or often they were entirely influenced by factious political motives. The civil courts, on the other hand, when once they had been freed from the unjust advantages afforded to the patricians, seem to have worked thoroughly well. The law which they dispensed was clear and precise, and if sometimes it was over formal, it was also usually impartial. To the upper classes, from whom the magistrates, the umpires, and the advocates all were taken, these courts were an excellent induce- ment to train themselves in the knowledge of law and in the practice of public speaking. But the poorer classes were never likely to take any share in them ; and so they missed entirely what was one of the most powerful means of education in Greece, and especially at Athens. We now pass on to speak of that form of public life which alone retained its charms for the humbler subjects of the Emperors. Juvenal says of the people of his time : " The nation which once gave commands, magistracies, armies, and every thing else, now holds itself in, and is only anxious and eager for two things, bread and the games of the Circus." To the games we now will turn. 8. Public games. Games of some sort certainly existed in Rome from the earliest times, though the stories, which are told about the games cf Romulus, 94 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. cannot be true in the form in which we have them. But the games of the Circus cannot have been held before the time of Tarquinius Priscus ; for it was he who drained the swampy valley between the Palatine and the Aventine, and began to form the Circus there; before his time there was no place in Rome suited for races and other sports of the kind. Like many other of his changes, the games seem to have been brought to Rome from their northern neighbours in Etruria, though much was apparently added in imitation of the Greek festivals. It seems odd to us to find that they were intended at first as a means of propitiating the gods ; and were observed especially in honour of the powers of earth, who could grant or refuse health to men and productiveness to crops and cattle. Hence we find them often performed in times of plague or famine. The great Circus at Rome was about 600 yards in length and 200 in width : round the whole of it were rows of seats for spectators, the front rows built of stone, and reserved for senators and knights ; those behind of wood, and free to all the citizens. In the time of Julius Caesar there was room for 150,000 people; but afterwards, when the Circus .was enlarged after it had been destroyed by fire, we hear of 250,000 persons watching the games at once. At one end of the Circus were dens or stalls (carceres) from which the chariots were let out at the same time to start in the race : down the centre ran a low wall (spina) adorned with statues, pillars, altars, and shrines : at each end was a turning-post (meta), consisting of three columns close together, round which the chariots raced. The usual course for each heat (missus) was seven laps of the Circus ; i.e., somewhat more than three miles; and at each end of the spina were seven large egg-shaped balls placed on a column, and taken down one by one as the laps were completed, so that the spectators might know at once how many were yet remaining. V-] THE ROMAN'S 2>UELlC LIFE. 95 96 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. The games introduced by Tarquinius Priscus were in honour of the deities to whom he built the great temple on the Capitol (p. 118), Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva : these were called the Ludi Roman! or the Ludi Magni, and were held at first for one day, after- wards for five days, beginning on September 4th. But besides these there were many other games in honour of various gods and goddesses, the most im- portant being the Megalesia (p. 119) at the beginning and the Floralia towards the end of April, and the Ludi Apollinares early in July. In the time of Augustus there were regular public games on 66 days in the year; but under the later Emperors the duration and the number of the festivals were so increased that they extended over 135 days in the time of Marcus Aurelius. Besides these there were games vowed by the generals of the state for some special successes (ludi votivi), or ordered by the senate in times of danger or sickness (ludi imperativi) ; and also funeral games, given by rela- tions on the death of an eminent man. So that the Romans had abundant means of obtaining the pleasure in which they delighted. When games of unusual splendour were expected, the city would be thronged by visitors from every part of Italy, and even from distant provinces : at the triumph of Julius Csesar, the throng was so great that many were crushed to death. The public games may be divided into three kinds : i, The Ludi Circenses, games of the Circus; 2, Ludi Scaenici, the entertainments of the Theatre ; 3, Munera Gladiatoria, shows of gladiators, commonly given in the Amphitheatre. 9. Games of the Circus. Let us try to picture to ourselves the scene in the circus on one of the days of the Roman games in the time of the Empire. Notice has been duly given long beforehand. The law-courts are closed, and the senate has adjourned. Some of the lawyers and statesmen have gladly followed the example of Cicero, and exchanged the unwhole- v.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE. 97 some air of a Roman September for the fresh breezes of Tusculum or Praeneste and a welcome country holiday. But their places are more than filled by the crowds of strangers. Long before daybreak there are streams of people pouring into the upper seats of the circus ; for vast as it is, it is far too small for the numbers that throng to see the games. Women and men sit side by side, but no slave is allowed to enter; for every one present is expected to appear in the toga of the Roman citizen. The hours of waiting are spent in eager talk about the chances of the various stables ; the latest reports about the health of the horses and the drivers pass from mouth to mouth, and betting is running high. Here and there there are some who are thinking ruefully that it will not be for them to watch the thrilling struggle. They are the locarii, needy fellows who have come betimes to secure a good place, which presently they may sell to some late-rising wealthier citizen, for a sum large enough to keep them through the week. As the crowds increase the designatores have enough to do to usher all into their proper places ; and we may perhaps see some unfortunate who had ventured to intrude into the seats reserved for the knights, driven, like the man of whom Martial tells us, from place to place, till at last he finds bare standing-room on the topmost of the many rows. At last the seats are packed to their utmost; even the lowest row, the podium, with its places of honour for senators, magis- trates, Vestal Virgins, foreign ambassadors, and other distinguished persons, is filled from end to end. The sound of distant music reaches the eager throngs. The gods are coming from their Capitoline height to share the sports of the Senate and people of Rome. Through the main gate of the circus, close by the carceres, a band of musicians enters the vast arena. Close behind them, heading the procession (pompa), of which he has the charge this day, follows the consul in his chariot. He wears the dress sacred 98 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. to Capitoline Jove, and only assumed in his honour on festal days like these, or when the long triumph mounts from the Forum to his temple (p. 1 18). Round his car are his clients in snow-white togas. Then follow the younger citizens in troops of cavalry or companies of infantry; the various performers who are to take a part in the sports ; the chariots, the singers, and the priests. And crowning the whole array we have the images of the gods and goddesses. Some are borne aloft on biers (fercula), others ride in the sacred chariots (tensae) drawn by horses, mules, or elephants ; before them incense rises from golden and silver censers. Their appearance is the signal for shouts of applause and invoking cries, directed according to the pursuits or the caprices of the various members of the crowd. But if the Emperor is present and he rarely fails to be the welcome which he receives, if not less hearty, is more deliberately regu- lated : the form and the time of applause are set by officers stationed at intervals throughout the vast assembly, who raise the bidden shout, and repeat it as often as previously directed. Yet for all official precautions, it may be that less pleasing sounds are mingled with the thunders of acclaim : for the voice of freedom finds a vent securely from the midst of such crowded masses; and when face to face with his people at the games of the Circus the Emperor may chance to hear some expression of their feelings, which would not have otherwise reached his ears. But now those who entered in procession have been marshalled to their proper seats, and all eyes are fixed upon the consul as he sits in his elevated box. Horsemen have been riding up and down in the arena to see that all is in readiness, and to an- nounce to the spectators the beginning of the sports. Now the consul drops to the ground a napkin (mappa) ; and at once the doors of the carcercs are opened. Out rush four four-horse chariots and dash along the arena. Two horses in each are yoked; v.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIPE. 9? two others are attached by traces. The chariots are two-wheeled, light and small. The drivers stand upright in them, leaning against the reins, which pass around their backs, but we notice at the girdle of each a knife, by which the reins can be cut in case of accident. The dress of the drivers, the body of the cars, and the trappings of the horses are all of a colour, which differs in the case of each, and the shouts of the spectators are loud in favour of one or another of the colours. There are four great racing establishments in Rome, owned by different companies ; and from these the magistrate who gives the games has to hire all that is needed. The two oldest are those which have liveries of white (albata) and red (russata) respectively ; the green (prasina) and blue (veneta) have been added afterwards ; but now the green is the favourite, and we can tell from the shouts that its party (factio) is much the most numerous. Meanwhile the chariots are speeding on their course, with the spina on their left hand, each aiming to secure or to retain the advantage of th^ innermost station. The greatest test of skill is when the meta has to be rounded; to give it too wide a berth would be to lose time and distance; to take it too closely would mean to run the risk of a fate like that which Orestes is reported in the Electra of Sophocles to have suffered, when, "Just as his horse was turning, unawares He strikes the furthest pillar, breaks the spokes Right at his axle's centre, and slips down From out his chariot, and is dragged along With reins dissevered. " As the chariots successfully round it again and again thirteen times has the feat to be accomplished the shouts of the partisans ring out in triumph. At last the seventh round is all but completed , the charioteers hanging over their horses urge them on with lashes and wild cries ; the excitement rises to its height ; with a frantic rush the white line (alba linea) drawn loo ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. across the arena is reached ; and the victorious driver is conducted to the president of the games to receive his substantial reward, to ride in triumph before the eyes of the applauding multitudes, and to pass out at the other end of the circus at the gate reserved for the victors. Another missus follows, and another, and yet another ; the crowds look on unwearied, although they are sitting for the most part bare-headed in the rays of an Italian autumn's sun. Broad hats were only allowed after the time of Caligula. At noon there is a longer break ; and they hurry to the booths which are found in the colonnade that runs along at the back of the topmost rows, to get some food and drink, unless indeed this happens to be one of the days on which the Emperor, or the magistrate who is presiding at the games, has provided refreshments to be distributed among the spectators by the hands of thousands of slaves. Then the racing begins again, until the regular number of twenty-five courses has been run. If we remember that each was more than three miles in length, and that there must have been some interval between them, we can easily believe that the shadows of evening are drawing on before the crowds begin to disperse. Indeed we can hardly see how it was possible for Domitian to give, as we are told he did, a hundred courses in a day, even though the number of rounds was shortened from seven to five. Such is a picture of the chariot-races of the circus. But these were by no means the only amusements provided there. Sometimes the day was varied by athletic contests, foot-races, leaping, wrestling, quoiting, throwing, and boxing. Sometimes the vast arena was flooded, and sea-fights were represented . in mimic show. But the amusement of all the most welcome to the people was the venatio, or hunt, in which wild beasts were matched against each other, or against men trained to fight them. Every corner of the empire was ransacked to supply its unfamiliar animals, and the numbers exhibited almost pass belief. Pom- V.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE. 101 peius, in his second consulship, provided 500 lions and 410 panthers and leopards for five days of games; Julius Caesar turned 400 lions into the arena at once ; and Augustus, on the famous tablet which contains the history of his reign, records it among his exploits that he had had 3,500 elephants killed in the circus. 10. The Theatre. Compared with the mad devotion to the games of the Circus, the theatre was never much cared for at Rome ; and any attractions that it had were not of the highest character. There were doubtless from the first dramatic entertainments at Rome, consisting chiefly of extempore witticisms directed at each other by the actors, who were gener- ally young men of good position ; and these continued to be the staple of the popular plays called the Atellan farces, brought to Rome from Campania, and played by none but citizens. The first professional actors are said to have been brought from Etruria in B.C. 364; but these confined themselves to fantastic dances and gestures, performed to the music of the flute, without any songs or dialogues. A Greek freedman, named Livius Andronicus, about 120 years after this, introduced the first regular plays, which he translated or adapted from the Greek. Like all the play-wrights of his time, he took part in the acting himself. The plays were divided into two parts, the diverbia, or dialogues and speeches, which were re- cited, and the cantica or lyrical parts, which were sung to music. We are told that Livius was so frequently encored that he lost his voice ; so he obtained per- mission of the people to station a slave by the flute- player, who was to sing the cantica, while he himself accompanied them with the proper gesticulations. The custom that thus arose remained on the Roman stage; and the actors never sang the cantica them- selves, but only appeared to be singing them, while the real performer was hidden at the side of the stage. Tragedies were never much liked at Rome, and under the Empire they appear to have been endured only 102 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. because of the opportunity which they afforded for the most profuse, and often the most ill-placed splendour. Comedies were somewhat more popular ; but there are two facts about them which seem to us surprising. In the first place, the plays which were adapted from Greek writers, and which preserved the Greek charac- ters, manners, and scenes the comoediae palliatae, as they were called, from the Greek pallium, in which their characters were dressed were always much more liked than the comoediae togatae, which dealt with the manners of Rome. Secondly, no later rivals ever surpassed in popular favour one of the very earliest of the comedians, Titus Maccius Plautus, and only one, Publius Terentius, even approached him. But there was another kind of entertainment in the theatre, much more popular than plays. These were the pantomimes, consisting wholly of music and danc ing. A single actor would undertake to represent by his movements and gestures the whole of a story, sometimes long and complicated, and often of a very immoral character. The leading actors in this kind of show were great popular favourites, and received large sums for their performances. Besides these there were all manner of jugglers, rope-dancers, acrobats, clowns, ventriloquists, and the like ; and in the midst of a tragedy the audience would insist upon the introduction of a popular performing bear or a pair of boxers. The Roman theatre at first was nothing but a rude kind of platform erected in the open air, where those who had not brought stools from home, as they did to the pit of the Globe or the Blackfriars theatre when the plays of Shakspere were first produced, had to stand through the performance as patiently as they might. Afterwards wooden theatres were erected for the various games ; but these were taken down again when the performances were over. It was not till the very close of the Republic, in the year B.C. 55, that the first stone theatre was erected by Pompeius. Two V.] THE ROMAN'S PUBLIC LIFE. 103 more followed in the reign of Augustus ; but these sufficed for the needs of a population which probably numbered not much less than a million souls. It is true that the smallest of them held 20,000 spectators at a time, and the largest 40,000. The seats were assigned to the citizens according to their ranks ; the orchestra the "dancing place" of the chorus in a Greek theatre to the senators, the fourteen lowest rows to the knights, the rest to ordinary citizens ; but admission was free to all. The theatre was open to the sky, but the sun was kept off by awnings (vela), and the air was cooled and scented by fragrant spray. The actors were not honoured artists as at Athens ; as a rule they were slaves, belonging to the master of the troupe (dominus gregis), from whom the presiding magistrate hired them. At the same time we find exceptions to this in the case of men like the comic actor Roscius and the tragedian ^Esopus, both men of wealth, and friends of Cicero. An actor needed to be carefully trained and educated, and therefore, if a slave, he was often of great value to his master. n. Gladiators. Almost all the entertainments spoken of above were brought into Rome from Greece, and the favourite performers were Greeks. But there was another form of amusement, to which the people were passionately devoted (although no Roman author speaks of it with any favour), which was wholly of Italian growth. This consisted in the shows of gladi- ators. It is probable that these arose from the custom of sacrificing slaves at the tombs of their masters : the slaves were afterwards allowed to fight with each other for their lives ; and, finally, they were trained for the purpose by men who kept large bodies of them as a speculation, and let them out to any one who wanted to give a show. The custom was brought to Rome from Etruria, where the wealth of the nobles had long enabled them to indulge in every kind of cruel and licentious sport. At first it was limited to funerals ; and the gladiators fought in the forum. But, as the 104 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. taste for these horrible shows increased, and the num- ber of the gladiators fighting at a time grew larger, the Circus v/as used for the purpose ; and now it became the custom for any one who wished to gain favour with the people to indulge them with a series of com- bats. The Circus, however, was ill adapted by its shape for anything but races ; so, in the time of Julius Caesar, an ingenious plan was devised. Two large theatres of wood were erected side by side close together : when they had served for their purpose, one of them was turned entirely round on pivots, the audience all remaining in their places, and brought to meet the other, so that the seats now formed an oval tier round an arena in the centre. This was called an amphitheatre, and was excellently suited for gladia- torial shows. Other amphitheatres were afterwards built in Rome on the plan of the building thus produced; and one of them, the famous Colosseum, was one of the vastest piles ever raised by human hands. This was erected in the reigns of Vespasian, Titus, and Domi- tian, and must have held some 90,000 spectators. It is now greatly damaged by time, by earthquakes, and most of all by the reckless spoliations of the Roman Popes and nobles in the middle ages; but it still remains, perhaps the most impressive of all the world's great ruins. The description already given of a day in the Circus, will serve in most respects for a picture of a gladiatorial show. There were the same crowded seats, the same pomp and splendour, the same wild excitement. The gladiators were of various kinds, named according to the manner in which they were armed and fought. One of the favourite contests was between a retiarius, who had no defensive armour, but was armed with a net in which to catch his opponent, and a three-pronged fork with which to spear him when entangled in the meshes, and a gladiator fully armed after the fashion of the Gauls or the Samnites, who had to pursue him if he missed his cast, and to kill him before he could repeat it. As a VI.] THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. 105 rule they fought in pairs ; but sometimes whole bands were matched against each other. When a gladiator was disarmed or wounded, his fate was in the hands of the spectators. If he had fought well and bravely, they signified by applause and by waving of handker- chiefs their wish that he should be spared ; but, if they were in a cruel mood, or if he had in any way failed to please them, they pointed downwards with their thumbs in silence, and he received the finishing blow. CHAPTER VI. THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. i. It is always hard to give a true account of the religious beliefs and feelings of any nation. There is often so much that is strange to us, that we are in danger of failing altogether to see what there is good and true under the new and, it may be, repulsive forms of creed and practices. But it is especially hard in the case of the Romans ; for all their writers, whose works remain to us, lived at a time when the nation had been long and deeply influenced by the teaching of the Greeks. Now the Greeks and the Romans had come to have very different ways of thinking about the unseen powers. It is true that there was a time in their early common home when they had had the same gods to worship, and had doubtless worshipped them in much the same fashion. But since those days many hundreds of years had passed away. The two nations had been living in different lands ; their ways of life had been dif- ferent in many respects ; they had had very different neighbours. And so, when we attempt to conceive for ourselves the earliest beliefs of the Romans, not so much from the books of their classical writers, as from the institutions and practices which still were lingering among them, we find them to have been quite other than those which existed among the Greeks. Perhaps it will be best here to try to sketch the 106 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. history of their growth and changes; we shall thus be able to see most easily how much belonged to the Roman people originally, and how much was afterwards taught them by the poets and thinkers of Greece. 2. The earliest gods. The first conception which men of the Aryan race had about the unseen powers, seems to have been drawn from the great expanse of heaven. In this they believed they saw the abode, and indeed in a certain way, the actual form of the power which ruled the world. They 'called it Dyaus, "'the bright one," a word which in Greek came to be Zeus, and in Latin Jovis. But this power they thought of usually as the Father; and so both in India, in Greece, and in Germany it was common to add the word " Father" to his name; and in Italy the two words grew together, so that he was always spoken of as Juppiter (Jovi-pater) or afterwards as Jupiter. We cannot be sure about the thoughts of a time which was much earlier than any written records; but so far as we can see at present, men did not at first believe in many different gods, but only in many different forms of the action of the one great power. In the earliest days, then, there were many names for God ; but these did not at first imply that there were many Gods ; only that at one time He was thought of as showing His power in one way, and at another time in another way. Now some of these names remained always as epithets, but others came to be thought of as denoting different gods, and thus polytheism a belief in many gods spread widely in various nations. Among the Romans we can see very clearly both these processes in action. Their great god Jupiter was worshipped under many surnames. The first, and apparently the most widely spread in Italy, was Jupiter Leucetius, the god of light, the bright sky of day. Then there was Jupiter Summanus, the god of the nightly sky. Under this form he was at one time worshipped with especial VI.] THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. 107 honour, inasmuch as the thunder-storms of night are at once more terrible and more significant, because more rarely happening, than those which come on by day. But in time he was degraded from his place of honour, and was only invoked by thieves who walk unseen when the heavens are dark at night. Then the God of Heaven was regarded as the wielder of the thunder-bolt, and was worshipped as Jupiter Pistor, the crusher. As pistor was also used for the man who crushed or ground corn into flour and after- wards baked it into bread, the later Romans could not understand why Jupiter should have this name, and Ovid tells us a foolish story to account for it : but there cannot be any doubt that the name was given to him first because he was the God whose bolts could crush his foes. Then there was also Jupiter Feretrius, to whom a Roman general who had slain the general of the enemy brought his spoils in triumph : it is not quite clear whence this name was derived ; but it may perhaps mean the " Striker." Jupiter Stator was thought by the Romans of Cicero's time to be " the Stayer" who stayed the flight of the soldiers in battle, or the " Stablisher," who gave endurance to the state ; but we find the same name given to him in India, and there it seems to mean " he who stands " erect in the chariot of the sun. The name under which he was afterwards chiefly honoured, that of Optimus Maximus, came in, we shall see, at a somewhat later time than that which we are now considering. By the side of Jupiter, the god of heaven, there was a goddess also common to the Greeks and Romans, who represented another and a very important side of the national religion. This was Vesta, whom the Greeks called Hestia, the goddess of the hearth and home. We shall see by and bye how large the place was which the family held in the religion of the Romans; and of this family religion Vesta was the very centre and embodiment. Now these two, Jupiter and Vesta, were the only 14* 10 log ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. two divinities whom the Romans and the Greeks had derived from their common ancestors. There were some whom the Romans in the course of their history borrowed from the Greeks. There were others whom the Greeks chose to identify with some of their own gods and goddesses; and the Romans were willing to believe any fancy that brought them ' nearer to a nation to which in many respects they looked up with reverence. But these were mostly wrong iden- tifications, resting either on a seeming likeness of attributes, or on a chance similarity of names. For instance, the god who was worshipped most widely among the Italian tribes was Mars or Mavors. He was, as his name implies, the god of "manliness." This notion includes creative power : so he was looked upon as the father of the people ; the ever youthful and bountiful god of plenty. The bright season of spring was sacred to him : the name of its first month (Martius) was borrowed from his. He received the first-fruits of the year ; and to him the farmer prayed that his sheep and kine might bear abundantly. The name Gradivus, by which he was often known, means ''the god of growth.' But of course one of the first proofs of manliness to a Roman was prowess in war; so that Mars became naturally the War-god also. Now the War-god of the Greeks was Ares ; but the place which he held among them was quite different from that of Mars among the Romans. He is the destroying god of war : in strength he is divine, but in mind and heart he is brutal and savage. In Homer it is not he, but the goddess of wisdom, Athena, who gives victory to heroes ; and Ares himself is wounded by a man, and flies off howling from the field We see, then, how unlike Mars is to Ares, and how misleading it is to confuse them. In another case there is even less likeness in nature, though some- what more in name. The Romans had a god of the homestead, the hcrctum or enclosure, whom they called Herculus or Hercules. He was properly a farmer's VI.] THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. 109 god, but as, in the olden time, property consisted mainly in land and farm-stock, he came to be thought of as the guardian-god of property generally, and so as the god of commerce. In the streets of every town, and by every road-side, altars were set up to him, at which oaths were taken and bargains struck by traders ; and he received the tithe of all commercial gains in the shape of a banquet, at which he was supposed to join his worshippers. We could hardly find a greater contrast to the Italian Hercules, than in the Herakles whom the Greeks of later days taught the Romans to look upon as one and the same divinity. Herakles has nothing to do with farms or property; he is, as his name shows plainly, "the glory of the air of heaven," the sun-god ; his life is one of toil and battle for men ; his course is darkened and apparently hindered by the clouds that gather around it, but he scatters them all as he goes, and his life is closed by a fiery but glorious death. In other cases the Romans borrowed one attribute or function of a deity from the Greeks, and knew or thought little of anything further than this, as when they brought in the worship of a new god of trade, Mercurius, taking this function alone from Hermes, who was indeed a god of trade, but very much else besides. Hence it is plain that we must not follow the Romans in using their Latin names for the gods and goddesses of Greece, or else we shall often f be led astray. The divinities of whom we have spoken, Juppiter, Vesta, Mars, and Hercules, are perhaps the most important who were worshipped in the earliest days. But to picture to ourselves the heavenly assembly as it then existed, we should have to add many another god. There were in the first place the deities of th,e country-life before the days of the building of Rome : Saturnus, the god of sowing and the tillage of the fields; Ceres or Dea Dia, as she had once been called, the fertile power of the earth that causes crops to grow; Pales and Faunus, I io ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. the gods of the shepherd's flocks. There were the two great goddesses, who seem to have come to the Romans from the Sabine portion of the citizens, Juno, the type of queenly womanhood, Minerva, the em- bodiment of wisdom. There was the two-faced Janus, the god of opening and shutting, the sun-god who brings the opening day, and again at his departure shuts up the world in darkness; and with him was his sister, Diana, the moon-goddess, queen of the night. We may see, too, though holding a place much lower than that which is taken on the Greek Olympus by the deities which came most near to them in nature, Venus, the goddess of purity and grace, and Neptunus, whose rule extends over inland pools and rivers, as well as over the unfamiliar sea. Faintly appearing, too, in dim and shadowy outline, there are the forms of countless heavenly powers, whose names are strange enough to us, but who help us much to form a notion of the spirit of the Roman religion. Every action in life, from the most important down to the very pettiest, has its own protecting spirit. There is Vaticanus, who prompts the child's first cry, and Fabulinus, who teaches him his earliest speech. There is Edusa, who teaches him to eat, and Potina, who teaches him to drink ; Abeona, with whom he leaves the house; Iterdiica, who guides him on his way; Domidiica, who leads him home, and Adeona, who brings him in again. We know of the names of no less than forty-three .who were concerned with the actions of a child, and of ten, besides the greater deities, who had charge of marriage in its various aspects. Prayer for a bounteous harvest was offered to Mother Earth and to Ceres ; but the worship was incomplete unless the farmer invoked with them " the spirit of breaking-up the land and the spirit of ploughing it cross-wise, the spirit of furrowing and the spirit of ploughing, the spirit of ploughing in the seed and the spirit of harrowing, the spirit of weeding and the spirit of reaping, the spirit of carrying the VI.] THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. in corn to the barn and the spirit of bringing it out again." 3. The Roman's thoughts about his gods. Now facts like these show us what the gods of the Romans were to them. They were not living beings, but mere abstractions. The quick fancy of the Greek turned every deity of his religion into a stronger, wiser, and more beautiful, but still quite natural, man. Their gods loved, hated, quarrelled, made peace again, appeared to the eyes of mortals, and even had lived among them for a time in the form of men. The stories which the Greeks had to tell about their deities make up the most fertile and beautiful myth- ology in the world. But how could the Romans have any stories to tell about shadowy and vague abstrac- tions like the " goddess of departure from home," or "the spirit of cross-ploughing?" Over against the unequalled wealth of the Greek mythology, we can only set very few and meagre Italian stories, telling for the most part of a boy of miraculous birth, pre- served in his youth by the special favour of heaven, founding a city, giving it laws, and finally disappearing from the world as mysteriously as he had come to it. The religion of the Romans was in no way a theology : it did not teach men what the gods were in them- selves : but only what were the duties which men owed to them, and how they might secure their favour. What the gods were in themselves they did not pretend to know : as it has well been said, they appeared out of the unseen all-surrounding spiritual world to influence human life ; but before the eye of man had caught their form, and the heart had drawn near to them, they had sunk back again from sight and touch, like a wave into the bosom of the ocean. All that the Roman knew of his gods was that the custom of his fathers required him to offer to them prayers and sacrifices at particular times and seasons. To do this was his bounden duty (religio); and holiness (sanctitas), according to the words of Cicero, was the 112 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CIUP. knowledge of the rites which had to be performed. If the proper prayers were offered, and the sacrifices duly paid, a bargain was made with Heaven ; the worshipper had done his part of it, and he expected that the gods would then do theirs. But of any sense of what we should now call piety, there is hardly a trace to be found. It has been said that the essence of the Greek religion was to do under the sanction of the gods just what a man would best have liked to do without it. The spirit of the Roman religion was almost the very opposite of this : it was rather to do that which one did not like to do, because the gods demanded it. Only, Greeks and Romans alike had, at least in the early days, little or no notion that what the gods claimed was what was always right. Morality had little to do with religion. There was a contract made for certain earthly blessings, in return for certain honours. But in religion, as in law, the letter was more regarded than the spirit. If a man offered wine to Father Jovis, and did not mention very precisely that it was only the cup-full which he held in his hand that he gave him, the god might claim the whole vintage of the year. On the other hand, if the god required so many head in sacrifice, by the letter of the bond he would be bound to accept that number of garlic-heads ; if he claimed an animal, that animal, if more convenient, might be made out of dough or wax. We see, then, that the Roman religion was not in any way likely to remedy some of the worst faults of the people. There was nothing in it to make them less hard, cruel, and grasping. There was much to encourage that quibbling want of faith, which so often disgraces their dealings with other nations. But, on the other hand, there was the constant sense of living under obligations ; the idea of duty was developed ; the habit of obedience strengthened. The Roman's belief about the gods added little to the grace or joy of his life : but it made him a better servant of the VI.] THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. 113 state ; and so contributed largely to the strength and prosperity of the commonwealth. 4. The spirits of the dead. But there is another side of the Roman religion in its earliest form which we must not fail to glance at briefly ; for it had the greatest influence over the thoughts and even over the political history of Rome. The spirits of the departed were believed never to perish, but to live on in a kind of shadowy life, haunting the tomb in which they were buried, and depending for their well-being entirely on the honour which they received from their descendants. This was a belief which the Romans brought with them from their earliest home ; for we find it quite as strong in India and in Greece. It was the greatest misfortune for a family to become extinct, for then the spirits of the dead were left without any one to honour them. It was the greatest impiety to neglect the rights due to ancestors, for this was sup- posed to bring misery upon them in the unseen world. Hence it was at once a serious crime and a grave misfortune for a man to die unmarried ; not only was he doomed to lose all honours after death himself, but he also robbed the spirits of his forefathers of the honours which they ought to have continued to enjoy. These honours were paid at the family hearth, the centre of the family life. The goddess of the hearth was Vesta; but coupled with her in the worship were spirits called Lares or Penates. The nature of these spirits is not quite clearly ascertained. But, when we remember the importance that was attached to the honours paid after death to the spirits of the de- parted; when we recollect that these honours were always paid at the tomb in which the spirit was sup- posed to have his dwelling, and remember, further, that in the earliest times the father of the house was buried at his own hearth, we shall readily believe that the Lares and Penates were nothing but the deified spirits of ancestors. Spirits who had been neglected became evil mischievous ghosts (Larvae, Lemures); H4 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. those which continued to receive their proper honours became the kindly guardians of the family (Lares, Penates). Now, from this belief in the vital im- portance of the worship of the spirits of the house- hold, two very important consequences followed. In the first place, the only priest who conducted this worship was the pater familias : hence it was in his power to exclude from the sacrifices any whom he judged unworthy to take part in them. From this resulted, at least in part, that notion of the unlimited authority of the father, of which we have already spoken. But, secondly, no one could be present at the family sacrifice except one who was a member of the family. For any one to join in the worship of ancestors who was not really descended from them, or who had not at least become a son of the family by lawful adoption, was regarded as shocking sacrilege. Undoubtedly this feeling helped very largely to pre- serve that purity of family life, which was one of the most honourable things in the early history of Rome. But, again, the commonwealth was, as we have seen, regarded as one large family. As each household had its separate family hearth, so the nation had its common hearth in the temple of Vesta, and its common religious rites, at which no stranger might be present. Now the plebeians were aliens who had come to live in Rome ; but, according to the strict old Roman notions, they had no family life of their own, and no claim to share the family life of the nation. They were not even married according to Roman law ; and therefore they could not be properly fathers (patres). For them to claim the rights of citizens, and to ask to be allowed as magistrates to offer sacri- fices on behalf of the people to the national gods, was just as if a stranger had wished to thrust himself in at the family worship, and to usurp the place of the father as priest of the household. No doubt there were other motives which influenced the patricians in their long struggle against the claims of the plebeians; VI.] THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. 115 but at the heart it was chiefly this desire to preserve the purity of their religious rites which made them so obstinate in their resistance. 5. The temples and priests. The word templum means properly a spot marked off for sacred purposes, and might be used of any place set apart by the augur on which to make his observations, or even of that portion of the sky marked off by him in which to watch for omens. Then, without losing its older meaning, it was also applied to any building set apart for the worship of the gods. In the early times, of which we are speaking at present, a templum consisted of nothing more than a cella or chamber, to contain the image of the deity, or sometimes merely a niche (aedicula), before which stood an altar (ara). When- ever it was possible, these were arranged so that the opening of the cella fronted the west, in order that a worshipper standing before the altar, and looking towards the image, might face the east; and this position is still retained for the most part in Christian churches. But the templum was only regarded as the dwelling-place of the god ; the people never entered it to pay their worship ; still less did they meet in it to receive instruction. The erection of buildings of any architectural beauty as temples of the gods seems to mark the first step in the development of the Roman religion by the influence of foreign nations. The priests at Rome never formed a separate class, as in Egypt, and as in many modern nations. There was no special training needed, for they were in no way the teachers of the people; it was simply their duty to perform on behalf of the nation the sacrifices due to the gods according to the traditional rites. They were not excluded from other offices ; on the contrary, it was usual to choose the most illustrious statesmen or generals to fill the various priesthoods. We may distinguish two separate classes: (i) those who had a general direction of religious matters, and who can hardly be said to be properly priests; and rr6 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. (2) the priests of particular deities. Of the first class, there were two great colleges (collegia) or groups oi colleagues, with others of less importance. The first in honour and power were the Pontifices, who seem to have derived their name from pans in its original meaning of a road, and to have had the charge of the communications between different parts of the city and the state. But their control extended over everything which concerned religion, including the regulation of the Calendar, the days on which the law-courts met, and even the course of legal pro- cedure, in short, as they phrased it themselves, " the science of things divine and human." The chief of these was styled Pontifex Maximus; he was the official head of the Roman religion ; but how little he was of an ecclesiastic is shown by the fact that Julius Csesar was Pontifex Maximus all the time that he was conquering Gaul. The Pontifex Maximus had four col- leagues, all patricians, but afterwards four plebeians were added to the college. Next in rank and import- ance came the Augurs. It was the duty of these to as- certain the will of the gods upon any action which was contemplated by the state. This they did by observing the omens given by the flight or the cries of birds according to a body of rules, which formed the science (disciplina) of augury. They must be carefully dis- tinguished from the haruspices, or soothsayers, who were foreigners from Etruria. The latter by observing the organs of victims offered in sacrifice, and oy in- terpreting the meaning of lightnings, pretended to be able to prophesy in much greater detail than the Augurs, who could only say in general terms whether the gods gave their approval or refused it ; and so in course of time the haruspices became much the more popular body; but they never held the same rank in the state with the Augurs ; Cato forbade his steward to consult one; and Cicero, who was very proud of his election into the college of augurs, speaks of it as a shameful thing that a haruspex was VI.] THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. 117 admitted into the senate by Caesar. But even the pontifices and the augurs were not allowed to consult the gods or to advise unbidden by the magistrates ; the right of "taking the auspices" lay only with those to whom the people had entrusted it, and the priest, as such, was honoured for his special know- ledge, but bound to use it only when called upon to do so by the state. Of the priests of special divinities the most important were the three "kindlers" (Flamines) of Jovis, Mars, and Quirinus, the twelve Salii or "leaping priests" of Mars, and the twelve " Brethren of the Fields" (Fratres Arvales), who called upon the Dea Dia to bless the growth of the seed ; and to these we must add the six Vestal Virgins who kept the sacred fire ever blazing in the temple of Vesta, honoured as the common hearth of the city. Such were the gods that were worshipped in Rome in the earliest days of the city, and the priests who took part in their service. 6. The Ritual. The forms of worship were for the most part bright and simple. There was not, on the one hand, any deep sense of sin that needed atonement, such as meets us in some of the Greek beliefs, or any desire for moral purity and growth. The blessings which were sought were mainly such as would lead to wealth and comfort in this life. But, on the other hand, there was little terror or gloom in the worship. It consisted mainly in songs and dances, followed by a sacrifice to the gods ; and this really meant a feast to the worshippers, which would give them a welcome change from their usual vegetable diet. When those who were taking part in the worship had bathed themselves in a running stream, robed themselves in their snow-white togas, and placed on their heads garlands of the leaves sacred to the god in whose honour they were gathered, a crier bade all keep silence, that no word of ill omen might be heard. The piper (tibicen), whose presence was indis- pensable at any solemn sacrifice, then blew a strain on n8 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. his pipes : all present veiled their heads : the sacrificer repeated a prayer dictated by the priest or pontiff: the victim, adorned with garlands (serta) and ribbons (vittae), was gently led to the altar: wine, incense, and salted meal were sprinkled on his head : and the attendant (popa) struck him down with a mallet and cut his throat with a knife. The blood was caught in a basin and poured upon the altar. The inside of the carcase (exta) was sprinkled again with incense, wine, and meal, and burnt in the flames. The flesh (viscera) furnished a feast for the family, or on public occasions for the priests. 7. Changes in the Roman religion. We have now to trace very rapidly the various influences which brought new deities into Rome. This can only be done now in very brief outline ; but perhaps it will be worth while to attempt it, that we may see the more clearly how different the Rome of Csesar was in this respect, as in so many others, from the Rome of the early Republic. The first great change is said to have been made when Tarquinius Priscus brought craftsmen from Etruria to build the great temple on the Capitoline hill to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Of Tarquinius himself we cannot be said to know any- thing with certainty ; but it cannot be doubted that it marked a stage in the history of Roman religion when Jupiter the king, under his new title of Optimus Maximus, was honoured, along with the two other Capitoline deities, by a temple which long remained the highest triumph of art at Rome. Next, at the close of the Regal period, we have the story of the Sibyl and her books. This is of great importance as marking the beginning of the steady influence of Greece on Rome in matters of religion. The Sibylline Books were entrusted to the keeping of two guardians, afterwards increased to ten and to fifteen. The college formed by these was the first of the sacred offices opened to plebeians ; and we find that almost all the changes which we afterwards read of are VI.] THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. 119 directly set down to its influence. In the first place, the sacred books contained the oracles given by the priestess of Apollo, and so that god became familiar to the Romans, though at first under the corrupted form of Aperta, "the opener." Soon followed the introduction of three Greek deities, Demeter, Perse- phone, and Dionysus, identified with the old Italian Ceres, Libera, and Liber; we are told that in the building of the temple sacred to these Greek artists were for the first time employed instead of Etruscans. A century later the Sibylline books enjoined the Romans to keep a new feast in honour of Herakles, now fully identified with Hercules. Another century passed, and under the same direction the Greek god ot healing, Asklepios, was solemnly fetched to Rome and worshipped under the name of Aesculapius. As the circle of Roman conquest grew, the gods of more distant countries found a welcome on the banks ot the Tiber. As early as the war with Hannibal, Venus of Eryx in Sicily, a goddess of Phoenician origin who had little in common with the old Italian Venus, was brought to Rome, again by the orders of the guardians of the sacred books; and before the end of the struggle the same authorities brought the Great Idaean Mother (Magna Mater) from the Phrygian Pessinus, and founded in her honour the Megalesian games. Meanwhile a crowd of foreigners had been settling in Rome, each bringing with him the religious rites and beliefs of his country. To all these the Roman policy granted a ready tolerance. It was admitted to be the duty of every man to worship the gods of his nation in the manner to which he was accustomed; and if any Roman citizen chose to add to his own national gods those of any other country, the state had nothing to say to this, so long as he discharged all the duties that were incumbent upon him. The foreign deities which found most favour at Rome towards the end of the Republic were those which came from the East, and especially from Egypt. The 120 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. [CHAP. worship of the Roman gods had always been chiefly a matter of formal obligation, in which the heart had been little concerned. Now, by the lapse of time, the old-fashioned rites and ceremonies had lost all the little meaning that they once had had ; and the religious emotions found need for their expression in other forms. Hence the great popularity, among both high and low, of various forms of Eastern supersti- tion : and especially of the worship of Isis, Osiris, and Serapis. We cannot dwell on the nature of these forms of worship; but there are three points of especial importance to notice : unlike the old Roman faith, they were directed by priesthoods form- ing a caste quite severed from the common duties of life ; and they aimed very much at the excitement of religious emotions ; but like it, they were little connected with morality, and could not do much to help the worshipper to a nobler and purer life. Whatever was done in the later days of Rome to check the evil, which was growing so fast from the gradual decay of the manly simplicity of earlier days, was done by the Greek philosophers. There is not space for us now even to glance at the work they did. But it may always be remembered with thankfulness that, at a time when to many the city of Rome would have seemed wholly given up to evil ; when the rich men were living in selfish luxury, rioting in every kind of vice, or at best looking on with despair at the ruin of the state and of society; when the vast masses of the poor in the city were idle and reckless paupers ; and when the canker of slavery was eating away the very heart of the nation ; there were yet living and teaching in the midst of it all, some of the wisest and best of the men whose words have come down from that ancient world to us. 8. Conclusion. There is very much more which might have been told about the life of the Roman people, if space had been left to dwell upon it. We might have watched a Roman army as it marched VI.] THE ROMAN'S RELIGION. 121 out into the field to fight its country's battles. The legion, with its various divisions, the arms of the troops, the arrangement of the camp, the order of the line of battle, would all have called for notice. Or we might have said more about the mighty works which have left their traces in every land in which the Roman has ever held rule the roads, the bridges, and the aqueducts. The division of time* by the calendar, the weights and coins in use, the methods of trade and commerce, the interest of money, the revenues of the state, and many other topics like these would have well repaid our study. But on all such points as these information must be gathered from larger works. This little book will have done enough, if it has shown in rough and unfinished out- line something of the daily life of that mighty people, which, starting with the humblest beginnings, has left its mark on the world more deeply than any nation ever known in the history of man. See Appendix. APPENDIX. I. -THE ROMAN MONEY. IN the earliest days of all the Aryan nations coined money was unknown, and value was estimated in cattle, large or small (pecus), from which money (pecunia) afterwards got its name. Hence in the earliest laws fines were assessed in cattle ; and we have still remaining large pieces of bronze found in Italy weighing about five pounds, and stamped with figures of animals : these seem to have been used for sacred offerings long after they had been replaced in commerce by coined money. Then, as gold and silver were still very rare in Italy, copper was made the standard, and prices were estimated in pounds of copper. In the time of the Decemvirs (Primer of Roman History, p. 16), the Romans began to coin money from copper alloyed with tin and lead. The largest coin was the as, which was supposed to weigh a pound (libra) ; but we see from the unworn speci- mens of this as libralis which have been found, that it weighed from the first not more than ten ounces (unciae), instead of twelve. The reduction was made that it might be equal in value to the small Sicilian coin (nummus), which was largely current at this time in commerce, silver then being worth 250 times its weight of copper. The as was at this time cast, not struck, and at Rome it had on one side the head of Janus, on the other the prow of a ship. They coined also the semis (half an as), the triens (4 ounces, nominally), the quadrans (3 ounces), the sextans (2 ounces), and the uncia (one ounce). These all bore on one side the prow of a ship, on the other the head of some particular deity. By degrees the as was diminished in weight and APPENDIX. 123 value. Shortly before the First Punic War it was reduced, first to four ounces, and then to two, the names of the smaller coins remaining the same, but their value sinking in proportion. About the time of the latter reduction, silver became the stan- dard instead of copper ; and three silver coins were struck the denarius 10 reduced asses, the quinarius = 5 asses, and the sestertius, 2*^ asses. During the Second Punic War the as was reduced to one ounce ; before the time of Caesar it had become half-an-ounce, and under the Empire it was only fi ounce. We have a parallel to this change in the case of the French sou, which is now worth less than a half- penny, although it is the direct descendant of the Latin solidus, which was worth 17 shillings (p. 71). In the time of Cicero we have, then, As = less than a penny Sestertius = about twopence Denarius = about eightpence farthing. The denarius was the silver coin in ordinary use ; the sestertius, being inconveniently small, was seldom coined ; but all accounts were kept in sestertii, or, as they were often called, nummi. The genitive plural sestertium was used, according to rule, after millia; so that 3,000 sestertii would be tria millia sestertium ; but afterwards the word sestertium was treated as if it was a neuter singular ; and they said tria sestertia. It must be remembeied, however, that the sestertium was never a coin, but only an expression used in reckoning, as equivalent to a thousand sestertii, or about 8 los. For sums above a million sesterces it was common to use the numeral adverb : thus 2,000,000 sesterces vicies centena millia sestertium. In this case the words centena, millia were usually omitted ; so that vicies sestertium, or even vicies alone means "twenty times [a hundred thousand] sesterces." Gold was very little coined in Rome until the victories of Sulla and Pompeius in the East brought 15* 124 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. much wealth into the city. Julius Cassar was the first to make it the standard ; his aureus or, as it was after- wards sometimes called, solidus, was worth 25 denarii or 100 sesterces. II. THE ROMAN CALENDAR. The division of time into weeks was not in use at Rome before the introduction of Christianity ; but the Romans were aware that the Jews were accustomed to keep every seventh day sacred ; and references to the Jewish Sabbath are to be found in writers like Horace and Juvenal. Each month was divided by the Idus or Ides, that is, the day when the moon is at its brightest, a day fixed for those months originally long (/. e., March, May, July and October) as the i5th, and for the other months as the i3th ; and by the Nonae or Nones, which fell, as we should say, on the eighth, but as the Romans, reckoning after their custom inclu- sively, said, on the ninth (nonus) day before the Ides, /. e., on the 7th or the 5th day of the month. The first day of each month was called the Kalendaeor Calends, because it was in early times the custom for one of the minor pontiffs to keep watch for the appearance of the new moon and to proclaim (Kalare) its advent to the people. The other days of the month were reckoned backwards from the Nones, from the Ides, or from the Calends of the following month, always counting in- clusively, so that, e.g., March 5th was called the third day before the Nones, March yth. It is plain that at first the months must have been lunar months ; and, from the names of the months which are still retained by us, we can see that the year began with March. But in what way a year of ten lunar months was made to agree, even pretty nearly, with a solar year of 365^ days, it is impossible for us now to say. Several guesses have been made, but none seem certain. About the time of the Decemvirs the lunar months were given up for an arrangement by APPENDIX. 125 which March, May, July and October had 31 days each, February 28, and all the others 29. As this year of 355 days was much too short to agree with the sun's course, 22 or 23 days were intercalated every other year, in the middle of February, the regular reckoning of the days being stopped after the Ides, until the mcnsis interkalaris had run out. But this intercalation was a little too much ; and, besides, it was not fairly carried out, for the pontiffs added days or omitted to do so, according as they wished to shorten an enemy's term of office or lengthen a friend's, or for other personal reasons. By the time of Julius Csesar, the calendar had thus got into great confusion, and the months did not fall at all in their proper seasons. For instance, Caesar says in his Civil War " It was Jan. 4th, and the winter was approaching : " the real date having been November 5th. In his dictatorship, to remedy this evil, he made the number of days in each month what it now is, so bringing the year up to 365 days instead of 355 : then he ordained that in every fourth year the sixth day before the Calends of March should be reckoned twice over, whence the name for leap-year, bissextile (an/ius bissextilis, a year with two sixth days). Thus the average length of a year was 365^ days, which is so near the truth that no great inconvenience was caused by the error for centuries. The names of the months were mensis Jan- uarius, Februarius, Martius, Aprilis, Maius, Junius, Quintilis, Sextilis, September, Octo- ber, November, December. After the death of Julius Csesar the mensis Quintilis was called in honour of him mensis Julius : and similarly, after the death of Augustus the mensis Sextilis received the name Augus- tus. The accompanying table gives the Roman dates, after the reform of Csesar, corresponding to some of our English dates, from which the rest will be easily found : it must be remembered (i) that the name of the month is an adjective agreeing with the feminine words 126 ROMAN ANTIQUITIES. Kalendae, Nonae, Idus ; (2) that the date is put in the ablative; (3) that by a curious attraction, instead of saying, e.g., quarto die ante Nonas Januarias, it is more common to say antequartum diem Nonas Januarias, i. e., before (the fourth day) the Nones of January. Januarius Aprilis Martiua (so for (so for (so for Day of Augustus Junius, Maius, English and September, Julius, Month. December). November). October). i Kal. Jan. Kal. Apr. KaL Mart. 2 a.d. iv. Non. Jan. a.d. iv. Non. Apr. a.d. vi. Non. Mart. 4 Prid. Non. Jan. Prid. Non. Apr. a.d. iv. Non. Mart. 5 Non. Jan. Non. Apr. a.d. iii. Non. Mart. 6 a.d. viii. Id. Jan. a.d. viii. Id. Apr. Prid. Non. Mart. 7 a.d. vii. Id. Jan. a.d. vii. Id. Apr. Non. 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