Through the words of Tacitus, Seneca, Martial, and a host of others, including ordinary Romans, Guy de la Bedoyere takes the reader into a world of violent politics, civil disorder, unspeakably brutal entertainments, extravagance, decadence, eroticism, exotica, and staggering inequality, participated in daily by the Roman people from the hyper-rich elite to the lowliest slaves. Populus places those who experienced Rome in person at the forefront of their story, from the rabble-rousing senator Clodius Pulcher to Pliny the Elder and Hortensia who defended the rights of women in court to the ex-slave and celebrity baker Eurysaces.
Tiberius Claudius Secundus, a Roman nobleman of the 1st century, had a simple but admirable philosophy on life. “Baths, wine and sex destroy our bodies,” reads the inscription on his tombstone. “But only baths, wine and sex make life worth living.” He died at the age of 52, one hopes with a smile on his face.
Life in Rome could certainly be fun, especially if you had money and were male. But it was also a dangerous and violent place, “both glamorous and ghastly”, writes Guy de la Bédoyère in this guide to the sights and smells of the greatest city in the ancient world. You could encounter obscene extravagance, or at least the desperate desire to convey such (“We all live in pretentious poverty,” the satirist Juvenal wrote), and appalling degradation side by side. Palaces coexisted with slums. The bodies of executed criminals were left to rot on the banks of the Tiber and the streets ran with excrement, 325 tonnes of which was produced each day, according to de la Bédoyère. Hoick your toga, Marcus! No wonder they had high pavements and stepping stones for crossing.
Yet the city was not wholly left to fester and steam in its own effluence. Marcus Agrippa, the best friend of the emperor Augustus, repaired the city’s sewer system. He built 700 basins, 500 fountains and 130 reservoirs to collect the water that was brought into the city by a network of aqueducts, 90 per cent of which were subterranean, creating a standard of sanitation not seen again in Europe until the 1800s. These he decorated with 300 statues and 400 marble pillars in a building project that apparently took only a year. It puts the headaches of our own infrastructure projects in context.
As today, though, there was always someone trying to pull a fast one. An analysis of the city’s water system a century after Agrippa by Sextus Julius Frontinus, who said Rome’s aqueducts were a greater wonder of construction than the pyramids or any Greek temple, found that 28 per cent of the incoming water was being illegally siphoned off by wealthy Romans, tapping the stream for their gardens.
Life among the common people, the P in the city’s acronym of SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus, “the senate and the people of Rome together” — signifying the blend of rich and poor), was short and harsh. And it drew inhabitants from the whole world, sometimes by force, to work as slaves.
Cicero described Rome as “a city made up from a collection of nations, in which there are many traps, many tricks, all kinds of vice going the rounds, and the arrogance, insolence, evil, pride, hatred and troubles of many people to be endured”. Above all it was noisy, whether from the clatter of iron-rimmed cartwheels on stone, merchants hawking their wares, political factions electioneering and often brawling or schoolmasters beating an education into their pupils. The poet Martial was so irritated by the noise of wailing students next door that he wondered how much he could pay their teacher to conduct his lessons in silence.
The poor, especially the fifth of the city’s population who depended on their grain dole, lived on bread, some vegetables and maybe a cheap cut of meat. This contrasted with the feasts of flamingo tongues, stuffed dormice and roast peacock that you could expect at the palace, yet some emperors were keen to pop out to share the people’s street food. Vitellius, one of the more gluttonous rulers, liked to frequent what the poet Horace calls unctae popinae, or greasy spoons — perhaps because he felt there was less chance of him being deliberately poisoned there than when dining with friends.
Among the wealthy, extravagance was required for social one-upmanship and the poor benefited with fun in the arena. Aemilius Scaurus organised a parade of 150 leopards and introduced Rome to its first crocodile, which Pliny called “an evil quadruped”, and hippopotamus. The mad emperor Commodus is thought to have killed 100 lions in one day, skewering them with 100 spears. Other politicians laid on festivals of chariot racing at the Circus Maximus, which was so vast it could seat more than 150,000 spectators. Pliny, who generally felt that if you’ve seen one chariot race you’ve seen them all, was not a sports fan, but wrote that he loved race days because it got the rabble off the streets. Briefly, the noise of Rome abated.
This fulfilled the rulers’ side of the contract with the people, which was defined by Juvenal as panem et circenses (bread and circuses). In other words, give the masses food and entertainment and they won’t kick up a fuss. Are we any different today?
Populus: Living and Dying in the Wealth, Smoke and Din of Ancient Rome
Author: Bedoyere, Guy De La
ISBN: 9781408715598
$NZ 39.99
To order a copy go to: www.unibooks.co.nz/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=172835