Rome

slaves, many of whom were being trained as gladiators by their Roman masters. He and his army had fought and marched their way to Roman Gaul; they conquered several full Roman armies but were eventually destroyed in Lucania, in southern Italy, after their hope of crossing to Sicily failed. Crassus savagely crucified six thousand of the rebels (the unclaimed ones, of course; the rest went back to their owners, for Crassus had great respect for the laws of property) along the Appian Way. Somehow it is difficult to mourn the fact that this supremely brutal real- estate king was captured and killed by the Parthians when they defeated his legions at Carrhae in Mesopotamia, during a failed punitive expedition in 53 B.C.E.

It is conventionally assumed that the coming of Christianity made the lives of slaves easier, but this is untrue. Early Christian emperors did not press for manumission, and fourth-century sermons were not filled with exhortations to Christian slave-owners to set their human property free. Rather, they tended to follow the advice of Saint Paul—slaves should stay put and obediently serve their masters as the good served Christ. Most Church leaders and ordinary pious Christians were slave owners themselves—a fact which was not going to be ignored in centuries to come, in the American South.

Slavery’s impact on Rome was too vast to be only economic. It also changed, by steady and irreversible degrees, the nature of Roman education of the young. In the early days of the Republic, this had tended to be amateurish and tradition-obsessed. A child’s teacher was his father, the paterfamilias, with some input (of an entirely conservative kind) from the mother. The curriculum consisted largely of learning about the national heroes of the Roman past, and the corpus of law known as the Twelve Tables. The chief skill taught by this conventional education was rote memory, coupled with a strong emphasis on physical culture and basic military knowledge. Plutarch in his Life of Cato the Elder, recounts how the father of Cato the Elder, who owned a slave named Chilo, an accomplished teacher of other boys, would not allow his own son to be taught by anyone but himself. “He thought it improper to have his son reprimanded by a slave, or to have his ears tweaked when he was slow in learning; nor would he have him under obligation to a slave for so priceless a thing as education.… In his son’s presence he refrained from obscene language no less than if he were in the presence of the vestal virgins. Nor would he ever bathe with him.” This was just the kind of cold-bath upbringing that the importation of large numbers of Greek slaves was sure to dispel. As education passed into the hands of Greek instructors, its nature changed: it was Hellenized and liberalized. Instead of the rote learning of conservative tribal wisdom, it favored debate and speculation, philosophical argument, sophistry, and the study of literature, both Greek and Latin.

Most of all, it made oratory the chief skill to acquire, the true test of intellectual capability. Cicero describes how his boyhood and early manhood were devoted to learning it in different places and under different masters. First, he “gave myself up wholly” to instruction by Philo, an expatriate Greek philosopher who, with his intellectual friends, had fled from Athens because of the Mithridatic Wars, and settled in Rome. Cicero studied pleading with Molo of Rhodes, another Greek; dialectic, with Diodotus the Stoic, who actually moved into Cicero’s house. “The foremost teachers, knowing only Greek, could not, unless I used Greek, correct my faults or convey their instruction.” Now it was time to go to Athens, where he studied with the philosopher Antiochus and went “zealously” into rhetorical exercises under the direction of Demetrius the Syrian. Next he traveled through Asia Minor, attaching himself to one teacher after another, starting with “the most eloquent man of all Asia,” Menippus of Stratonicea. Such a varied, intense curriculum was, of course, unusual. But under the old Roman dispensation, it would have been unthinkable, because no one would have thought it necessary.

The words “Augustan Age” evoke the name of the poet Virgil as inevitably as the word “modernity” does that of the painter Pablo Picasso. Publius Vergilius Maro, native of Mantua: he was not born in Rome, but few of the writers who created the canon of Latin verse and prose were. Livy came from Padua, Catullus from Verona, Martial from a backwater in Spain. On his deathbed, Virgil supposedly dictated the epitaph for his tomb: “Mantua me genuit; Calabri rapuere; tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua, rura, duces.” “Mantua bore me; Calabria took me away, now Naples holds me; I sang of flocks, farms, and leaders.” Modest enough, for the greatest poet Rome ever produced.

This was the man whose lifetime (70–19 B.C.E.) and work associate him indelibly with the reign of Rome’s first emperor. Sixteen years of his life as a Roman citizen were disfigured by civil war, by the murderous proscriptions that followed the killing of Julius Caesar and the defeat and suicide of Cassius and Brutus at Philippi. And by the time Italy settled down somewhat, there were still the massive expropriations and evictions to contend with: Roman soldiers were rewarded by their masters with land confiscated from those who had owned it in peacetime, and this dislocated the rural society of Italy. Something like a quarter of the good land of Italy is thought to have changed hands in this disastrous way, a trauma reflected in Virgil’s first published work, the Eclogues or Bucolics:

??????A godless soldier has my cherished fields,

??????A savage has my land: such profit yields

??????Our civil war. For them we worked our land!

??????Aye, plant your pears—to fill another’s hand.

The speaker is the farmer Meliboeus, in Virgil’s First Eclogue: and he is lamenting his loss of home, forced on him by the great, distant world of politics. “Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi/siluestrem tenui Musam meditaris auena: / nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arua: nos patriam fugimus.” “Tityrus, here you loll, your slim reed-pipe serenading the Muse beneath a sheltering canopy of beech, while I must leave my home place and the fields I love: we must evacuate our homeland.”

His family was moderately well off—well enough, at least, to send him to Mediolanum (Milan) and Rome to be educated in philosophy and rhetoric. It is possible, though not certain, that Virgil’s family estates were lost in the massive confiscations that followed the Battle of Philippi in 42 B.C.E., when free land was issued to Octavian’s veteran soldiers, but other property was given to him, near Naples, thanks to the benevolent intervention of his well-placed friend Maecenas. He is said to have been worth ten million sesterces when he died, a handsome fortune which can only have come to him in gifts from Augustus.

Virgil was tall, dark, and shy; he seldom went to Rome, preferring rural life. He had weak lungs (having coughed blood for much of his life, he died at fifty-one, though that was not an uncommonly short life span) and a fine reading voice; he is known to have read the Georgics aloud to Augustus for four days straight, taking turns with Maecenas when his throat got hoarse. Everyone praised the expression and dramatic power of his reading. It irked him to be accosted by admirers, and when this happened on the street—as it often did, when the word of his poetic powers and his friendship with the emperor got around—he would hide in the nearest house. In Naples, his modesty of speech and behavior got him the nickname of “Parthenias,” “the Virgin.” Of course he was no virgin, and his preference was for boys.

How did a poet make a living in ancient Rome? The short answer was: not at all, or else through patronage. This was only the literary extension of one of the most durable commonplaces of Roman life, the relation between the client and the patron in everyday dealings. There was little question—if possible, even less then than now—of a poet’s living off his royalties, since no publishing industry existed. Books were made in small numbers, but few people bought them. When Pompeii and Herculaneum were overwhelmed with lava from Vesuvius in 79 C.E., thousands of statues and scores of wall paintings were buried; they have since been found, but all the digging on these sites over the last couple of centuries has exhumed only one private library.