SOCIAL LIFE AT ROME IN THE AGE OF CICERO.*
• Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero. By W. INarde Fowler. London: 'tarn:Hist and Co. [10s. net.]
To illustrate the social life of remote antiquity must, we think, always be a hard task. Great events and great figures often, it is true, stand out in almost startling clearness, but over the daily doings of the obscure multitude time lays its all-effacing hand, and it is only here and there from some chance allusion in literature, from some broken tombstone, from a bit of scribbling on a wall, or a shred of papyrus in a rubbish-heap, that we seem to learn anything about common folk. And this is assuredly true of the age of Cicero. Of few ages, in fact, do we knew at once so much and so little. Sulla, Catiline, Pompey, Crosses, Antony, Caesar, and a score of others are as familiar to us as the men of our own day. We watch their goings out and comings in, we almost enter their houses and become their intimates, but of the multitude. that thronged the streets of Rome, of the plebs, or mere " fillers up" of the State, and of the vast mass of slaves, our ignorance is.almost complete. Homer does not hold all but "Zeus-born kings" of less aeoonnt than the great Romans of Cicero's time did ordinary men. The slave was for the most part reckoned a mere chattel who, when "aged or diseased," should, as Cato recommends in his work on agriculture, be "sold!' along with "old waggons, old tools, and whatever else is useless" ; while the city mob of freemen. needed, no doubt, to be kept in humour, to be- bribed with corn-doles and amused with shows, but otherwise were left to live, breed, and die in their " rabbit-warrens," no one cared how. The population of Rome alone was, perhaps, considerably over half-a-million. Yet in 104 B.C. the tribune- Philippua declared that there "were not more than two thousand persons of substance (g-ui rem haberent) in the State," and Cicero denounces the utterance as "criminal," because it suggested the "levelling (aeguationem) of fortunes." That is how he writes in the treatise On Duty which be addressed to his, son, who was then studying philosophy at the Univemity on an allowance of £800 a year, and his language is typical of the spirit of his age. Rome had, in fact, conquered the world for the profit of a few, and the word "Republic" had become a euphemism for a narrow oligarchy, into which only birth, wealth, and occasionally genius found. admittance. Outside that charmed circle every- thing was trivial ; within it life was of the. fullest. Its members were all, as it were, Princes, the great ones of the- earth, who levied tribute from all nations, while they fought, intrigued, and gambleduraong themselves for the vast prizes of ambition. Here and, there, indeed, some quieter epirito stood aloof from the struggle. The learned Sulpicins—non magis iuris.consultu-s.guam iustitiae—was content in privacy to lay the solid foundations of Roman law ; Atticus cultivated in seclusion the fine art of making friends of everybody, and money out of everything.; while Lucullus resigned the laurels of victety in order to build villas, collect books, and leave a name which is still honoured in gastronomy. But these were the exceptions. The most were swept into the wild struggle and perished in it. From the day when Catiline fell at Faesulae to the day when the head of Cicero was nailed upon the Rostra, Rome for twenty years saw tragedy sucoeed tragedy, and the lesser interests .of "social life" were dwarfed and overmastered by larger passions. Even in Cicero'a Letters, 'intimate and gossipy as they are, it is public life that really fills the writer's thoughts. Philosophy and literature, his -own household affairs, or the last scandal no doubt attract him, but what absorbs his mind is the great drama that was daily being acted at Rome. Every scene, every piece of by-play, every gesture rivets his attention, and even when he turns aside from public life the only private affairs which concern him are those of the powrful and the great. You might as well seek to understand ordinary life by reading Disraeli's novels as by reading the correspondence of Cicero. The high place to which he had raised himself by his genius exactly suited his taste, his ambition, and his vanity. He enjoyed the splendour of his surroundings, but it dazzled him so that he was blind to everything outside, and when 'Mr. Warde Fowler states that "in his nine hundred con- temporary letters we have the richest treasure-house of social life that has survived from any period of classical antiquity," he is only justified if he makes the term "social" refer exclusively to what is now called "society." The world for Cicero is a world of great noblemen and great financiers. His political ideal is to establish that "concord of orders" which means to him the union of the aristocracy of birth or rank with the aristocracy of wealth; and his conception of private life is in accordance with it. He lived among men who built palaces, and only understands existence on a great scale. His own mansion on the Palatine cost him £28,000. while he possessed some six "villas" in the
country, and "for him and his friends the word villa meant gardens, libraries, baths, and collections of works, of art, with plenty of convenient rooms for study or entertain- ment." That is how be was himself housed, and he can be eloquent about the "Home," with its "altars, hearths, holy rites, sanctities, ceremonies," and the like, but the thousands of his countrymen who were huddled together in " lodging- houses " (insulae) lie outside his range of observation. Horace, good easy soul, tells us more in a few pages about the mei life of Rome than is to be found in all the volumes of Cicero; But then. Horace loved common folk. Old Ofella, that "rustic uncouth sage" who evolves his own philosophy and sups on "cabbage with a smoked ham-shank," is exactly to his taste. He likes to saunter round "the- Forum in an evening, ask the price of vegetables," and "listen to the fortune-tellers," or to introduce us to that delightful Cockney, Volteius Mena, as he sits beneath the barber's awning "gently trimming his nails" while he waits for a shave ; but to think of Cicero acting or talking in such a manner is impossible. We cannot imagine him enjoying the humours of the marketplace, or describing a common hawker- " Villa vendentem tunicato smelts popello."
Merely to pen such Latin would have disturbed him, and Horace's last three words are none of them to be found in the Thesaurus Cieeronianus. They belong to the language of a workaday world, and the great Consular does not recognise that form of "social life in which people meet in their shirt-sleeves around a costar's barrow.
It has been necessary to make these remarks because they partly explain why the present volume is disappointing. Mr. Warde Fowler does not "go out into the highways and hedges" in quest of information, but is for the most part content to cling to Cicero and society. Of his eleven chapters, one is "topographical," six deal expressly only with the upper classes, and another, which is headed "Religion," discusses Lucretius and the Stoics, but makes no reference to the hopes and fears of that vast and motley throng from whose ranks were to spring those " saints " whom St. Paul greets with such loving and careful recollection. His work is indeed admirably written, and presents a clear picture of the conditions among which the governing class at Rome lived, but it fails the student exactly where he most needs help and guidance ; nor will those who are familiar with llfarquardt's Privatleben der ROmer, or Gaston Boissier's Ciegron et see Antis, find in it much that is new.
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