The Private Life of the Romans Part 1

The Private Life of the Romans.

by Harold Whetstone Johnston.

PREFACE

In preparing this book I have had in mind the needs of three cla.s.ses of students.

It is intended in the first place for seniors in high schools and freshmen in colleges, and is meant to give such an account of the Private Life of the Romans in the later Republic and earlier Empire as will enable them to understand the countless references to it in the Latin texts which they read in the cla.s.s-room. It is hoped that the book contains all that they will need for this purpose and nothing that is beyond their comprehension.

It is intended in the second place for more advanced college students who may be taking lectures on the subjects of which it treats. The work of both teacher and student will be made less irksome and more effective if the student is aided in the taking of notes by even so general a knowledge of the subject (previously announced to the cla.s.s) as is here given. This I know from actual experience with my own cla.s.ses.

In the third place it is intended for readers and students of Roman history, who are engaged chiefly with important political and const.i.tutional questions, and often feel the need of a simple and compact description of domestic life, to give more reality to the shadowy forms whose public careers they are following. Such students will find the Index especially useful.

The book is written as far as possible in English: that is, no great knowledge of Latin is presumed on the part of the reader. I have tried not to crowd the text with Latin words, even when they are immediately explained, and those given will usually be found worth remembering.

Quotations from Latin authors are very few, and the references to their works, fewer still, are made to well-known pa.s.sages only.

To every chapter are prefixed references to the standard secondary authorities in English and German. Primary sources are not indicated: they would be above the heads of the less advanced students, and to the more advanced the lecturer will prefer to indicate the sources on which his views are based. It is certain, however, that all these sources are indicated in the authorities named, and the teacher himself may occasionally find the references helpful.

The ill.u.s.trations are numerous and are intended to ill.u.s.trate. Many others are referred to in the text, which limited s.p.a.ce kept me from using, and I hope that Schreiber's Atlas, at least, if not Baumeister's Denkmaeler, may be within the reach of students in cla.s.s-room or library.

It goes without saying that there must be many errors in a book like this, although I have done my best to make it accurate. When these errors are due to relaxed attention or to ignorance, I shall be grateful to the person who will point them out. When they are due to mistaken judgment, the teacher will find in the references, I hope, sufficient authorities to convince his pupils that he is right and I am wrong.

H. W. JOHNSTON.

THE INDIANA UNIVERSITY,

February, 1903.

INTRODUCTION

--1. The topics that are discussed in this book have to do with the everyday life of the Roman people. Such things will be considered as the family, the Roman name, marriage and the position of women, children and education, slaves, clients, the house and its furniture, clothing, food and meals, amus.e.m.e.nts, travel and correspondence, funeral ceremonies and burial customs, etc. These things are of interest to us in the case of any ancient or foreign people; in the case of the Romans they are of especial importance, because they help to explain the powerful influence which that nation exerted over the old world, and make it easier to understand why that influence is still felt in some degree to-day.

--2. Public and Private Antiquities.--The subjects that have been named above belong to what is called Cla.s.sical Antiquities, taking their place in the subdivision of Roman Antiquities as opposed to Greek Antiquities. They are grouped loosely together as Private Antiquities in opposition to what we call Public Antiquities. Under the latter head we consider the Roman as a citizen, and we examine the several cla.s.ses of citizens, their obligations and their privileges; we study the form of their government, its officers and machinery, its legislative, judicial, and executive procedure, its revenues and expenditures, etc. It is evident that no hard and fast line can be drawn between the two branches of the subject: they cross each other at every turn. One scarcely knows, for example, under which head to put the religion of the Romans or their games in the circus.

--3. In the same way, the daily employment of a slave, his keep, his punishments, his rewards, are properly considered under the head of Private Antiquities. But the state undertook sometimes to regulate by law the number of slaves that a master might have, the state regulated the manumission of the slave and gave him certain rights as a freedman, and these matters belong to Public Antiquities. So, too, a man might or might not be eligible to certain state offices according to the particular ceremony used at the marriage of his parents. It will be found, therefore, that the study of Private Antiquities can not be completely separated from its complement, though in this book the dividing line will be crossed as seldom as possible.[1]

[Footnote 1: Students in secondary schools will find useful for preliminary reading the outline of the Roman Const.i.tution in the Introduction to the author's "Selected Orations and Letters of Cicero." For more advanced students three books have lately appeared on this subject: Abbott's "Roman Political Inst.i.tutions," Granrud's "Roman Const.i.tutional History," and Greenidge's "Roman Public Life."]

--4. Antiquities and History.--It is just as impossible to draw the boundary line between the subjects of Antiquities and History. The older history, it is true, concerned itself little with the private life of the people, almost solely with the rise and fall of dynasties.

It told us of kings and generals, of the wars they waged, the victories they won, and the conquests they made. Then, in course of time, inst.i.tutions took the place of dynasties and parties the place of heroes, and history traced the growth of great political ideas: such masterpieces as Thirlwall's and Grote's histories of Greece are largely const.i.tutional histories. But changes in international relations affect the private life of a people as surely, if not as speedily, as they affect the machinery of government. You can not bring into contact, friendly or unfriendly, two different civilizations without a change in the peoples concerned, without altering their occupations, their ways of living, their very ideas of life and its purposes. These changes react in turn upon the temper and character of a people, they affect its capacity for self-government and the government of others, and in the course of time they bring about the movements of which even the older history took notice. Hence our recent histories give more and more s.p.a.ce to the life of the common people, to the very matters, that is, that were mentioned in the first paragraph as belonging to Private Antiquities. This may be seen in such t.i.tles as these: Green's "History of the English People,"

McMaster's "History of the People of the United States."

--5. On the other hand it is equally true that a knowledge of political history is necessary for the study of Private Antiquities. We shall find the Romans giving up certain ways of living and habits of thinking that seemed to have become fixed and characteristic. These changes we could not explain at all, if political history did not inform us that just before they took place the Romans had come into contact with the widely different ideas and opposing civilizations of other nations. The most important event of this sort was the introduction of Greek culture after the Punic wars, and to this we shall have to refer again and again. It follows from all this that students who have had even the most elementary course in Roman history have already some knowledge of Private Antiquities, and that those who have not studied the history of Rome at all will find very helpful the reading of even the briefest of our school histories.

--6. Antiquities and Philology.--The subject of Cla.s.sical Antiquities has always been regarded as a branch--"discipline" is the technical word--of Cla.s.sical Philology since Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) made Philology a science. It is quite true that in the common acceptation of the word Philology is merely the science of language, but even here Antiquities has an important part to play. It is impossible to read understandingly an ode of Horace or an oration of Cicero, if one is ignorant of the social life and the political inst.i.tutions of Rome. But Cla.s.sical Philology is much more than the science of understanding and interpreting the cla.s.sical languages. It claims for itself the investigation of Greek and Roman life in all its aspects, social, intellectual, and political, so far as it has become known to us from the surviving literary, epigraphic, and monumental records. Whitney puts it thus: Philology deals with human speech and with all that speech discloses as to the nature and history of man. If it is hard to remember these definitions one can hardly forget the epigram of Benoist: Philology is the geology of the intellectual world. Under this, the only scientific conception of Philology, the study of Antiquities takes at once a higher place. It becomes the end with linguistics the means, and this is the true relation between them.

--7. But it happens that the study of the languages in which the records of cla.s.sical antiquity are preserved must first occupy the investigator, and that the study of language as mere language, its origin, its growth, its decay, is in itself very interesting and profitable. It happens, moreover, that the languages of Greece and Rome can not be studied apart from literatures of singular richness, beauty, and power, and the study of literature has always been one of the most attractive and absorbing to cultivated men. It is not hard to understand, therefore, why the study of Antiquities has not been more prominent in connection with philological training. It was the end to which only the few pressed on. It was reserved, at least in systematic form, for the trained scholar in the university. In the congested condition of the old curricula in our colleges it was crowded out by the more obvious, but not more essential or interesting, subjects of linguistics and literary criticism, or it was presented at best in the form of sc.r.a.ppy notes on the authors read in the cla.s.sroom or in the dismembered alphabetical arrangement of a dictionary.

--8. Within the last few years, however, a change has been taking place, a change due to several causes. In the first place, the literary criticism which was once taught exclusively in connection with cla.s.sical authors and which claimed so large a part of the time allotted to cla.s.sical study has found a more appropriate place in the departments of English that were hardly known a generation ago. In the second place, the superior preparation in the cla.s.sics now demanded for admission to our colleges has relieved their courses of much elementary linguistic drill that was formerly necessary. In the third place, the last half century has seen a greater advance in the knowledge of Antiquities than all the years before, and it is now possible to present in positive dogmatic form much that was recently mere guesswork and speculation. Finally, modern theories of education, which have narrowed the stream of cla.s.sical instruction only to deepen its channel and quicken its current, have caused more stress to be laid upon the points of contact between the ancient and the modern world. The teacher of the cla.s.sics has come to realize that the obligations of the present to the past are not to be so clearly presented and so vividly appreciated in connection with the formal study of art and literature as in the investigation of the great social, political, and religious problems which throughout all the ages have engaged the thought of cultivated men.

--9. Sources.--It has been already remarked (--6) that Cla.s.sical Philology draws its knowledge from three sources, the literary, epigraphic, and monumental remains of Greece and Rome. It is necessary that we should understand at the outset precisely what is meant by each of these. By literary sources we mean the writings of the Greeks and Romans, that is, the books which they published, that have come down to us. The form of these books, the way they were published and have been preserved, will be considered later. For the present it is sufficient to say that a mere fraction only of these writings has come down to our day, and that of these poor remnants we possess no originals but merely more or less imperfect copies. It is true, nevertheless, that these form as a whole the most important of our sources of information, largely because they have been most carefully studied and are best understood.

--10. By epigraphic sources we mean the words that were written, scratched, cut, or stamped on hard materials, such as metal, stone, or wood, without thought of literary finish. These vary from single words to records of very considerable extent, and are briefly called inscriptions. The student may get a good idea of the most ancient and curious by merely turning over a few pages of Ritschl's "Priscae Latinitatis Monumenta Epigraphica" or of Egbert's "Latin Inscriptions." Of one sort of great importance, the legends on coins and medals, many have found their way into American museums. With modern inscriptions on similar materials and for similar purposes every student is, of course, familiar.

--11. By monumental evidence we mean all the things actually made by the Greeks and Romans that have come down to us. These things are collectively very numerous and of very many kinds: coins, medals, pieces of jewelry, armor, pottery, statues, paintings, bridges, aqueducts, fortifications, ruins of cities, etc. It is impossible to enumerate them all. It is upon such remains as these that most of the inscriptions mentioned above are preserved. Of the most importance for the study of the private life of the Romans are the ruins of the city of Pompeii preserved to us by the protection of the ashes that buried it at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79 A.D.

--12. It will be seen at once that the importance of these sources will vary with the nature of the subject we are studying and the fullness of their preservation. For example, we may read in a Roman poet a description of an ornament worn by a bride. A painting of a bride wearing such an ornament would make the description clearer, but any doubt that might remain would be removed if there should be found in the ruins of Pompeii a similar ornament with its character proved by an inscription upon it. In this case the three sources would have contributed to our knowledge. For other matters, especially intangible things, we may have to rely solely upon descriptions, that is, upon literary sources. But it may well happen that no Roman wrote a set description of the particular thing that we are studying, or if he did that his writings have been lost, so that we may be forced to build up our knowledge bit by bit, by putting together laboriously the sc.r.a.ps of information, mere hints perhaps, that we find scattered here and there in the works of different authors, and these perhaps of very different times. It is not hard to understand, therefore, that our knowledge of some things pertaining to Roman antiquities may be fairly complete, while of others we may have no knowledge at all. It may be worth remarking of literary sources that the more common and familiar a thing was to the ancients, the less likely is it that we shall find a description of it in ancient literature.

--13. Reference Books.--The collecting and arranging of the information gleaned from these sources has been the task of philologists from very early times, but so much has been added to our knowledge by recent discoveries that all but the latest books may be neglected by the student. A very full list of books treating of Roman Antiquities may be found in Hubner's "Bibliographie der kla.s.sischen Altertumswissenschaft," and a convenient list in Professor Kelsey's "Fifty Topics in Roman Antiquities with References," but the student should not fail to notice at the head of each chapter the lists of authorities to be consulted in the books specifically mentioned below.

These have been arranged in two cla.s.ses, systematic treatises and encyclopedic works, and the student who lacks time to consult all the references should select one at least of the better and larger works in each cla.s.s for regular and methodical study.

--14. Systematic Treatises:

Marquardt, Joachim, "Das Privatleben der Romer," 2d edition by A. Mau.

This is the seventh volume of the _Handbuch der romischen Alterthumer_ by Marquardt and Mommsen. It is the fullest and most authoritative of all the treatises on the subject and has a few ill.u.s.trations.

Voigt, Moritz, "Die Romischen Privataltertumer," 2d edition. This is a part of the fourth volume of the _Handbuch der kla.s.sischen Altertumswissenschaft_ by Iwan von Muller. It is the latest work on the subject, especially rich in the citation of authorities.

Guhl and Koner, "Leben der Griechen und Romer," 6th edition by Engelmann. A standard and authoritative work enriched by copious ill.u.s.trations. There is an English translation of an earlier edition which may be used by those who read no German.

Becker, W. A., "Gallus oder romische Scenen aus der Zeit Augusts," new edition by Hermann Goll. This is a standard authority in the form of a novel. The story is of no particular interest, but the notes and excursuses are of the first importance. There is an English translation of the first edition which may be used with caution by those who read no German.

Friedlander, L., "Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms in der Zeit von August bis zum Ausgang der Antonine," 6th edition. This is the great authority for the time it covers and will be found to include practically the history from the earliest times of all the matters of which it treats.

Blumner, Hugo, "Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Kunste bei Griechen und Romern." The very best description of the arts and industries of ancient Greece and Rome.

Ramsay, William, "A Manual of Roman Antiquities," 15th edition, revised and partly rewritten by Rodolfo Lanciani. This includes public as well as private antiquities, but the revision seems to have been but partial and the larger part of the book is hopelessly out of date.

Wilkins, A. S., "Roman Antiquities," and Preston and Dodge, "The Private Life of the Romans." Two little books, of which the former is by a good scholar and is worth reading.

--15. Encyclopedic Works:

Pauly-Wissowa, "Real-Encyclopadie der cla.s.sischen Altertumswissenschaft." A monumental work, destined to be for many years the great authority upon the subject. Unfortunately it is appearing very slowly and has reached only the word _Demodoros_. There are a few ill.u.s.trations.

Smith, William, "A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities," revised edition by Wayte and Marindin. This is the very best work of the sort in English, the best possibly of similar size in any language.

Baumeister, "Denkmaler des kla.s.sischen Altertums." The most richly ill.u.s.trated work on the subject, absolutely indispensable.

"Harper's Dictionary of Cla.s.sical Literature and Antiquities." Largely from Smith, but with valuable additions.

Rich, "Dictionary of Roman and Greek Antiquities." A convenient manual with many ill.u.s.trations. Very good for ready reference.