The Rise of Rome

or the emergence of reform movements unlikely. Of course, patrons could sometimes be mean or fall on hard times for one reason or another. Plautus imagines an unemployed and half-starved client lamenting his fate:

Why, just now in the Forum I worked on a couple of
fellows I knew, young lawyers, and, “Going to lunch, then?”
I in my innocence ask. And a terrible silence
settles upon us. Does anyone say “You come too!”?
Heads begin shaking. I tell them a nice little story,
one of my best. God knows how often it’s fed me.
Laughter then? No. Smiles? No.

Rome was a great and growing community, it was the center of government, it was where the action was. In fact, its inhabitants often dispensed with its name and instead referred to it as urbs— not any ordinary city but the city. However, urban life was corrupting; money made the rich idle, and unemployment did the same for the moneyless. Responsible citizens believed that the countryside was a far, far better place. After all, it was to his small farm that the dictator Cincinnatus retired after saving the state, eschewing glory and wealth. It was from smallholders that the Republic’s victorious legions were recruited. Cicero’s friend the antiquarian and polymath Varro wrote in De re rustica, his compendium of country lore: “It was not without reason that those great men, our ancestors, put the Romans who lived in the country ahead of those who lived in the city.”

An ordinary Roman farmer has left us his summary of the good life in his own words, found on an inscription at Forli, in Italy. It expresses the tough, hardworking, sober values of the countrymen:

Take all this as true advice, whoever wants to live really well and freely. First, show respect where it is due. Next, want what’s best for your master. Honor your parents. Earn others’ trust. Don’t speak or listen to slander. If you don’t harm or betray anyone, you will lead a pleasant life, uprightly and happily, giving no offense.

A new generation of politicians emerged after the end of the wars with Carthage, the most able but most unlikable of whom was Marcus Porcius Cato (called the Elder, or the Censor, to distinguish him from his first-century namesake). He came from yeoman stock and spent the earlier years of his adult life, when not fighting in the army, tilling his own fields, just like a latter-day Cincinnatus. Plutarch said of him:

Early in the morning, Cato went on foot to the [local] marketplace and pleaded the cases of all who wished his aid. Then he came back to his farm, where, wearing a working blouse if it was winter, and stripped to the waist if it was summer, he worked alongside his slaves, then sat down with them to eat the same bread and drink the same wine.

Talent-spotted by an aristocratic neighbor, he was introduced to Roman politics in the capital and soon rose to the top.

For Cato, there was something unforgivably Greek about the sophisticated self-indulgences of city life. Every true Roman’s moral guide, the mos maiorum, was a treasury of rural virtues. In his book on farming, De agri cultura, Cato observed that trade was more profitable than farming, but too risky; the same went for banking, with the addition that it was more dishonorable. By contrast, he wrote, “it is from the farming class that the bravest men and the sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most highly respected, their livelihood is most assured and is looked on with the least hostility.” The citizen, in the field with his plow and on the battlefield with his sword and spear, stood for all that was best about Rome.

Cato did in fact farm his own acres himself, but only when he was young and poor. An austere hypocrite, he lived very simply but amassed a fortune, against his fine principles, as a moneylender and a property investor. Once he had made his way in the world, he ran his estates as an absentee landlord. He gives the game away in his book. In it, he offers copious practical advice to a landowner like himself, who pays his farm only the occasional visit. The overseer or bailiff, who runs the business on his behalf and manages the workers, some of them slaves and others freeborn, is to be kept on a tight rein:

He must not be a gadabout; he must always be sober, and must not go out to dine. He must keep the farm laborers busy, and see that the master’s orders are carried out. He must not assume that he knows more than the master.… He must not consult a fortune-teller, or prophet, or diviner, or astrologer [an echo here of official fears of Bacchic cults and the like]…. He must be the first out of bed, the last to go to bed.

Cato is unsentimental. He wants the laborers to be well enough looked after to function efficiently, but that’s all. They should be either at work or asleep. Failure or illness, even old age, is not to be tolerated:

Sell worn-out oxen, blemished cattle, blemished sheep, wool, hides, an old wagon, old tools, an old slave, a sickly slave, and whatever else is superfluous. The master should have the selling habit, not the buying habit.

We can blame Cato for his mean-spiritedness and intellectual dishonesty, but the fact is that the heyday of the independent smallholder, tilling his own soil and sending his sons to war, was over. Sixteen years of burning, looting, and destruction by Hannibal’s army had emptied much of the Italian countryside and swelled the population of Rome. It would take many years for the land to recover, and in some parts of the south it never did.

POVERTY WAS PARTLY alleviated by fun, albeit in the cause of religion. Throughout the year, groups of days were dedicated to the gods and set aside as holidays. In the city, public and commercial business was suspended, the Senate did not meet, and the city’s routine was interrupted by festivals, or “games.” The oldest were the ludi Romani (Roman Games), founded in the days of the kings and celebrated in September. They featured pantomime dances set to flute music, which doubled as both ritual and entertainment, and from 240 B.C. plays were added to the schedule. The other games were founded during the nerve-racked time of the war with Hannibal and its aftermath, and were attempts either to placate the menacing supernatural order or to express heartfelt thanks for victory.

As already noted, the ludi Plebeii, or People’s Games, were established in 221 by the plebeian leader Gaius Flaminius. The ludi Apollinares, the games of Apollo, followed in 208; the ludi Cereales, the games of Ceres, in 202; and in 194 the ludi Megalenses, held in honor of the Magna Mater in front of her new temple on the Palatine.

Antiquarians like Varro were fascinated by the origins of live performance. They posited archaic rituals in the countryside, with dances and crude verses. Italians, wrote Virgil on the back of antiquarian speculation, were

accustomed to hold a
Beano, their poems unpolished and unrestrained their jokes:
They wear the most hideous wooden
Masks, and address the Wine-god in jovial ditties, and hang
Wee images of the god to sway from windy pine-boughs.

Professional dance companies were imported from Etruria, but (we are told) the Roman youths began to imitate them, adding obscene verses of their own composition. This blend of words, music and gesture was cleaned up and professionalized, and led to the presentation of written comedies, which were performed at the ludi. (The young amateurs maintained their tradition of ribald songs regardless.)

The first proper plays to appear at the Games were written by Livius Andronicus, a half-Greek who was sold