A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (25 page)

Knights and below lived in ground-or first-floor apartments in
insulae,
but patricians of senatorial rank traditionally operated – because theirs was a powerhouse
too – from a
domus,
an ancestral town house, often sited on one of the Seven Hills of Rome. (We have seen how Caesar rejoiced at being able to abandon his in the Subura, which had
become a slum.) Like townhouses in eighteenth-century London, graded from I to III, they varied in scale but all were designed to the same pattern. None was as grand as the houses of the rich in
Park Lane, Park Avenue or the Champs-Elysées, although they would have needed more servants to function, for in a pre-mechanical age, a patrician with his resident barber and hairdresser for
his wife also had to have messengers, stokers for the furnace, pole-bearers for the litters and the sedan chairs, a
brigade
as extensive as a London hotel’s for his chef – all
slaves of course, and even an individual to announce the time of day. A resident poet laureate, might, engagingly, form part of the establishment.

In a large
domus
husband and wife slept in separate, barely furnished bedrooms, and the staff were crammed, sometimes locked, into basement rooms so small they were virtually cells. The
regular
domus
was built as one rectangular floor, all rooms being lit from within, with no outside views, whether free-standing or part of a street; shops were let into
the outside walls. If there was an upper floor it would not cover the whole building and the rooms would be small. Augustus, in the modest house he lived in for forty years which was
sans
mosaics,
sans
marble,
sans
anything much,
⁵⁷
retreated to an upper room he called ‘Syracuse’ for secret discussions.
During the construction of the embankment for the Tiber, remains were found of five-storey houses with vaulted domes built into the rock, but these were as unusual as, say, the Countess of
Seafield’s house on the south-east corner of Belgrave Square, or the Frick Mansion in Manhattan.

The
domus
was entered by a vestibule, where visitors waited (and were kept waiting unless you tipped the usher) looking at the statues and trophies of the ancestors of the owner, or
indeed of the previous owner, since they were integral to the house. Giant double folding doors, ornate with bronze and ivory, faced the visitor (though the family could slip into the main part of
the house via a side entrance, above which there would be an inscription or a parrot in a cage trained to say ‘Good luck’ in Greek). The doors gave on to a large rectangular reception
hall where the wealth and style of the owner, in the shape of statues, brilliant – nay, garish – murals, mosaics and marble everywhere, especially for the basin and fountain which was
in the middle of this space under the open skylight. It was a room designed for showing off. Seneca, with little right since he too was a self-indulgent millionaire, complains of the
nouveau
riche:
‘He seems to himself poor and mean unless the walls shine with great costly slabs, unless marbles of Alexandria are picked out with reliefs of Numidian stone,
unless the whole ceiling is elaborately worked with all the variety of a painting, unless Thracian stone encloses the swimming-baths, unless the water is poured out from silver taps . . .’
Prominent was the strong box, secured to the floor by an iron rod, which held the family silver and money not lodged with a banker and which accompanied them on their travels. The private rooms
opening off the hall through tall doors consisted of the dining-room,
triclinium,
(quite small because only three couches surrounded a table), bedrooms, the library (with up to 3,000 scrolls
stored in pigeon-holes) and a picture gallery. Another room would be filled with family treasures and the wax death-masks of ancestors, which were trotted out for funerals and which, like much in
Rome, could be bought by parvenus wanting instant lineage, just as ‘family’ portraits could be acquired by war profiteers – often what they were – in the twenties in
England. Beyond the hall was the parlour where the master of the house would transact business and beyond that a window – the Romans used glass – with a view into the peristyle and
garden, where the family could dine outside in the summer.

In winter, portable charcoal-burning braziers and a central-heating system from the furnace in the basement circulated hot air through ducts in the floors and walls. Lavatories were cued into
the public sewers and water tapped from an aqueduct. (The Roman equivalent, for an ambitious maiden, of a ‘breakfast-eating Brooks Brothers guy’ was a man with a library and a private
loo.) Furniture was scanty, consisting of couches and beds (without sheets and blankets but with a few cushions), chests and wardrobes, tripods, backless chairs and folding stools, all, like the
kitchen utensils, beautifully
made, with carved lamps burning olive oil. Investing in elaborate drinking vessels of crystal, gold and silver, encrusted with jewels, was a
favourite way of spending money for Emperors (especially Nero) and subjects alike.

All in all, apart from the fact that a master or mistress could, in our period, have a slave crucified in the garden, the
domus
was a cosy place compared to the palaces of the rich in the
capitals of later Empires.

RELIGION

No single, revealed religion dominated Ancient Rome.

Jews believe that Moses showed them the one God through his Law, Christians that Jesus is the way of the same one true Lord, Muslims that Mahomet interpreted the will of Allah, Lord of the
Faithful, and with each of these monotheistic beliefs goes, as it were, a handbook whose assertions its believers would die for – the Torah, the Gospels and the Koran.

That the Romans had no one God, no one moral text, does not mean they had no religion. Not even the sophisticated, like Cicero, who had an opinion on everything, believed in the possibility of a
Supreme Being directing the universe, be he like Robespierre’s short-lived invention motivated by Reason, or like the latter-day Jupiter, grumpily omnipotent; but gods they had a-plenty.

Our Romans were exposed to, and curious about, religious cults from the East – they detested what they knew about the Druids from Gaul, Germany and its think-tank, Britain –
particularly Judaism, with which a few flirted, notably Poppaea, Nero’s extravagant lady, but it was two and a half centuries before an Emperor nailed the Cross, that unlikely symbol, to the
standards of his soldiers. In the meantime Romans lived with, but never had to die for, their own gods.

They honoured, celebrated and sacrificed to, rather than regularly worshipped, a variety of gods including some who had been human, like Caesar and all our Emperors except
Caligula and Nero. (Seneca wrote a satire about the reception of Claudius in the next world which was not kind.) The major Gods, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Saturn and Apollo, who alone kept his name,
had been taken over from the Greeks and had splendid temples in the Forum, maintained by the state, while lesser deities were the responsibility of patrician families, who competed for the
prestigious and occasionally profitable priesthoods, and the duties, mostly occasional and ceremonial, which went with them. Julius Caesar, who claimed for his
gens Julia
descent from Venus,
was not best pleased when Marius, the First Man in Rome, his uncle by marriage, made him as a young man
flamen dialis,
priest of the cult of Jupiter, which honourable but invidious
appointment debarred him from riding a horse, bearing arms and enjoying most delicacies. It was a malicious act. The awful old man, as he had then become, had spotted the boy’s talent and was
jealous. Of course Caesar cheated, galloping his horse, Bucephalus, on the other side of the Tiber at dawn, but he had to wait for Marius’ replacement by his erstwhile protégé
Sulla, the first dictator in Rome, to be released from his vows. Sulla, the least superstitious and most cynical of men, who nevertheless kept a little statuette of Apollo which he kissed in
moments of crisis, arranged the affair through the technicality of Caesar’s child-bride (aged eleven) not being truly Roman by birth. (He had earlier refused the dictator’s demand that
he divorce her on political grounds.) This episode shows how seriously Romans observed the
form
of their religion, however indifferent they were to the spirit.

Roman historians do not describe religious ceremonies any more than Macaulay retails the coronation of his hero,
William III, and one would search Trollope in vain for an
account of the liturgical activities of
his
ecclesiasts. In Rome they were an assumed part of life, unnecessary to record, but we do know that sacrifice of animals, in propitiation of the
god, was a
sine qua non
of any service, the prize offering being a milk-white bull and the least a tray of cakes. (No Orthodox Jew could quarrel with this practice, since six pages of his
current morning prayers detail the exact procedure for the slaughtering of animals and the sprinkling of blood on the altar, abandoned only after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and one
day, he must hope, with the Temple, to be restored.)

Births, marriages and deaths, obviously, were celebrated by invoking the gods, but also various gods were separately appealed to for special effects. The danger of crop failure through blight,
there being (happily, some would say) no pesticide in the ancient world, was a nightmare which had to be prevented by propitiating Robigo, the power of rust. Ovid writes how, returning to Rome one
April, ‘a white-robed crowd blocked my path./A Priest was passing to the grave of ancient Robigo/to offer on the altar entrails of dog and sheep/I went straight to him, wishing to understand
the rite.’ Ovid puts these words into his mouth:

This gentle poem, infused with the spirit of the Augustan Age, tenderly idealizing bucolic procedures, like the Emperor’s altar, winsome and only half-reverent, is typical
of a sophisticated
Roman’s attitude to religion. All are happy, except a reddish brown dog which has its throat slit.

The Emperor Augustus was not himself particularly moral in his private behaviour, but publicly he was a prig. He was, like all Romans, superstitious, but he was not religious. However, he
regarded the approval of the gods, as did the humbler of his subjects, as crucial to the safety and wellbeing of the state and would have nodded at Marx’s dictum that religion was the opiate
of the people. He dosed them heavily. He revived the national day of prayer to the goddess Salus (Greek, Hygeia) and for the Festival of the Century, a well-documented affair, commissioned Horace
to compose ‘a carefully scripted and well-composed hymn’ to be sung by choirs of twenty-seven boys and twenty-seven girls, all of whose parents had to be alive. It was a grand affair,
lasting three days in a wooden theatre specially built on the banks of the Tiber, but everybody had to stand up, including 110 wives of free citizens and the Council of Fifteen, the high flyers of
Rome, the relations and ‘friends of the Emperor’, descendants or ascendants of the consuls, generals and governors who had ruled, or would rule, the world. Augustus’ prayer was
direct. ‘O Moirae [the Fates], I pray and beseech you to increase the power of the citizens, the people of Rome, in war and peace . . . grant for all time safety, victory and might to the
citizens, the people of Rome . . . look with kindly grace . . . on me, my family and household, and that you may receive this sacrifice of nine ewe lambs and nine she-goats . . .’ and so on;
for three days in June the blood flowed for the gods, and the flat cakes and pastry cakes and cup cakes were dutifully burnt. The Fates must have been listening. Augustus reigned for half a century
and his dynasty supplied another four Emperors. M. Agrippa picked up the tab for the chariot races.