SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

by Mary Beard

Battle of Pharsalus

Gaius Peticius,

On the other side were a motley group of those who, for various reasons, did not like what Caesar was up to or the powers he seemed to be seeking. A few were probably as highly principled as they were unrealistic; as Cicero once said of Cato, ‘he talks as if he were in the Republic of Plato, when in fact he is in the crap of Romulus’.

But it was only later, in the romantic nostalgia under the early emperors, that they were reinvented en bloc as fully fledged freedom fighters and martyrs united in the struggle against autocracy. The irony was that Pompey, their figurehead, was no less an autocrat than Caesar. Whichever side won, as Cicero again observed, the result was set to be much the same: slavery for Rome.

What came to be seen as a war between liberty and one-man rule was really a war to choo...

Bibulus, Caesar’s unfortunate colleague in 59 BCE, died at sea near Corfu as he was trying to blockade the Greek coast. The murderer of Clodius, Titus Annius Milo, left his exile to join a Pompeian uprising and fell in the toe of Italy, hit by a flying stone. Cato, once it was clear that Caesar was the inevitable victor, killed himself at the town of Utica on the coast of what is now Tunisia in the most gory way imaginable.

According to his biographer, writing 150 years later, he stabbed himself with his sword but survived the gash. Despite attempts by friends and family to save him, he pushed away the doctor they had summoned and pulled out his own bowels through the still open wound.

As it was, ‘his life lasted longer than his power’. The murder, however, proved a wrong move for its perpetrators. Caesar, who turned up a few days later, apparently wept as he was presented with Pompey’s pickled head and shortly backed one of the rivals to the throne of Egypt. That rival was Queen Cleopatra VII, best known for her alliance, political and romantic, with Mark Antony in the next round of Roman civil wars. But at this point her interests lay with Caesar, with whom she had an open affair and – if her claims about paternity are to be believed – a child.

Metellus Scipio throwing himself into the sea. The distaste

Tiberius Gracchus

in 133 BCE. The question must be: what was Caesar trying to do and what made him so unacceptable to this group of senators that assassination seemed the only way out?

These ranged from questions of who could hold office in local Italian communities (no gravediggers, pimps, actors or auctioneers unless they were retired) to issues of road maintenance (householders to be responsible for the footpath in front of their house) and traffic management (no heavy-goods vehicles in Rome during the daytime except for the purposes of temple building or repair, or for removing demolition rubble).

triangular gable

This prompted a flood of jokes from Cicero: Caninius was such an extraordinarily vigilant consul that ‘he never once went to sleep in his whole term of office’; ‘in the consulship of Caninius you may take it no one had breakfast’;

In many ways, clementia was the political slogan of Caesar’s dictatorship. Yet it provoked as much opposition as gratitude, for the simple reason that, virtue though it may have been in some respects, it was an entirely monarchical one.

Only those with the power to do otherwise can exercise mercy. Clementia, in other words, was the antithesis of Republican libertas. Cato was said to have killed himself to escape it.

So it was not just a case of simple ingratitude when Brutus and the others turned on the man who had given them a second chance. It was partly that. It was partly motivated by self-interest and disgr...

Greeks had occasionally shared citizenship, on an ad hoc basis, between two cities. But the idea that it was the norm, as the Romans insisted, to be a citizen of two places – to count two places as home – was fundamental to Roman success on the battlefield and elsewhere, and it has proved influential right up into the twenty-first century. This was a Roman revolution, and we are its heirs.

It is not hard to imagine something of the day-to-day world of Polybius in Rome, as he pondered on the funerals he attended or shrewdly decided to claim sickness on the day a fellow hostage made his escape attempt. Nor is it hard to recapture something of the fun that the elder Cato must have had thinking up his stunt with the Carthaginian figs dropping out of his toga. But it is only in the first century BCE that we begin to have rich evidence for all the things that preoccupied the Roman elite beyond war and politics. These range from curiosity about

eloquent discussion of the folly of fearing death by Titus Lucretius Carus, in his philosophical poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura),

(those who do not exist cannot regret their non-existence, as part of the argument runs).

His fellow fighters could not stand the way he went around the barracks with a scowl on his face while trying to relieve the tension by cracking feeble jokes. ‘So why not employ him as guardian of your children, then?’ he retorted when a decidedly inappropriate candidate was promoted to a command position on the grounds that he was ‘mild mannered and sensible’.

When the day of the Battle of Pharsalus came, Cicero used Polybius’ tactic and was conveniently off sick. After the defeat, rather than move on from Greece to Africa with some of the hardliners, he returned directly to Italy to wait for an amnesty from Caesar.

Commentaries on the Civil War,

leaves that he had been awarded to celebrate his little victory. Eventually he accepted the inevitable: the senators had more pressing matters on their minds than his ‘bauble’, as he sometimes called it; he would give up any hope of a triumph and join Pompey.

Caesar was travelling with a battalion of no fewer than 2,000 soldiers as a guard and escort, which was an awful burden for even the most generous and tolerant host: ‘a billeting rather than a visit’, as Cicero puts it. And that was in addition to Caesar’s

How his own slaves and staff coped with this invasion, Cicero does not stop to say, or perhaps did not notice, but he congratulated himself that the evening had passed off well, even though he did not relish a repeat: ‘My guest was not the sort to whom you would say, “Please drop by again when you are next around”. Once is enough.’ The best one can observe is that entertaining a victorious Pompey would almost certainly have been just as much bother.

Roman marriage was, in essence, a simple and private business. Unlike in the modern world, the state played little part in it. In most cases a man and a woman were assumed to be married if they claimed that they were married, and they ceased to be married if they (or if one of them) claimed they no longer were.

property bulked larger for the rich too, in particular a dowry that the father of the bride provided, to be returned in the event of divorce. One of Cicero’s problems in the 40s BCE was that he had been forced to repay Terentia’s dowry, while the cash-strapped Dolabella seems not to have repaid Tullia’s, or at least not in full. Marriage to young Publilia would have held out the prospect of a substantial fortune to compensate.

The main purpose of marriage at Rome, as in all past cultures, was the production of legitimate children, who automatically inherited Roman citizen status if both parents were citizens or if they satisfied various conditions governing ‘intermarriage’ with outsiders.

That is what lies at the heart of the story of the Sabine Women, which depicts the first marriage in the new city as a process of ‘legitimate rape’ for the purpose of procreation. The same message was paraded repeatedly on the tombstones of wives and mothers throughout Roman history. One epitaph written sometime in the mid second century BCE, commemorating a certain Claudia, perfectly captures the traditional image: ‘Here is the unlovely grave of a lovely woman,’ it reads. ‘… She loved her husband with her heart. She bore two sons. One of these she leaves on earth, the other under the earth. She was graceful in her speech and elegant in her step. She kept the home. She made wool. That’s what there is to say.’ The proper role of the woman, in other words, was to be devoted to her husband, to produce the next generation, to be an adornment, to be a household manager and to contribute to...

Roman wall-painting depicts an idealised scene of an ancient wedding, mixing gods and humans. The veiled bride sits at the centre, on her new marital bed, being encouraged by the goddess Venus sitting with her. Against the bed leans a louche figure of the god Hymen, one of the deities supposed to protect marriage. On the far left, human figures make preparations for bathing the bride.

‘Egnatius Metellus

Volumnia Cytheris,

Catullus gave her the soubriquet Lesbia in his poetry, not only as camouflage but in order to gesture back to the Greek poet Sappho, from the island of Lesbos: ‘Let’s live, my Lesbia, and let’s love / And the mutterings of stern old men / Let’s value them at a single penny … / Give me a thousand kisses’, as one poem starts. Colourful as this material is, it cannot be taken at face value. Part of it is not much more than erotic fantasy. Part of it is a classic reflection of common patriarchal anxieties.

Women also regularly dined with men, and not only the sex workers, escorts and entertainers who provided the female company at classical Athenian parties.

fact, one of the early misdeeds of Verres turned on this difference between Greek and Roman dining practices. In the 80s BCE, when he was serving in Asia Minor, more than a decade before his stint in Sicily, Verres and some of his staff engineered an invitation to dinner with an unfortunate Greek, and after a considerable quantity of alcohol had been consumed they asked the host if his daughter could join

There is, however, not a single known example of this ever happening, and most evidence points in a different direction. A woman did not take her husband’s name or fall entirely under his legal authority. After the death of her father, an adult woman could own property in her own right, buy and sell, inherit or make a will and free slaves – many of the rights that women in Britain did not gain till the 1870s.

But it would be naive to imagine that the daughter of a peasant farmer who wanted to do a deal with his neighbour, or the slave girl who was to be freed in order to marry her owner (a not uncommon occurrence), had much more say in the decision.

One did not seem to be a serious proposition; another had nice manners; of another he reluctantly wrote, ‘I doubt that our girl could be prevailed upon’, acknowledging that Tullia had some say in the matter. But

‘Who has tied my son-in-law to his sword?’ is one of Cicero’s best-remembered jokes.

the wife, but they also capture some of the arguments in uncannily modern terms. On one occasion, when Pomponia snapped, ‘I feel like a stranger in my own house’, in front of guests, Quintus came out with the classic complaint ‘There, you see what I have to put up with every day!’ After twenty-five years of this, they eventually divorced. Quintus is supposed to have remarked, ‘Nothing is better than not having to share a bed.’ Pomponia’s reaction is unknown.

On the day of the marriage he is supposed to have replied to one of these, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be a grown-up woman [mulier] tomorrow’. The ancient critic who quoted this response thought that it was a brilliantly witty way of deflecting criticism and held it up for admiration. We are likely to put it somewhere on the spectrum between uncomfortably coarse and painfully bleak – one powerful marker of the distance between the Roman world and our own.

Those babies that were safely delivered had an even riskier time than their mothers. The ones that appeared weak or disabled would have been ‘exposed’, which may often have meant being thrown away on a local rubbish tip. Those that were unwanted met the same fate. There are hints that baby girls may generally have been less wanted than boys, partly because of the expense of their dowries, which would have been a significant

The houses on Astura and at Tusculum were only two of some twenty properties that Cicero owned in Italy in 45 BCE. Some were elegant residential mansions. In Rome he had a large house on the lower slopes of the Palatine Hill, a couple of minutes’ walk from the Forum, where many of the top-most drawer of the Roman elite, Clodia included, were his neighbours; his other houses were dotted throughout the peninsula, from Puteoli on the Bay of Naples, where he entertained Caesar to that rather crowded dinner party, to Formiae further north, where he had another seaside villa. Some were small rest houses or lodges strategically sited on roads between his far-flung larger properties, where he could stay overnight to avoid sleeping in seedy inns or lodging houses or imposing on friends.

Some, including his family estates at Arpinum, were working farms, even if they had a luxury residence attached. Others were straightforward moneymaking rental properties, such as the low-grade building from which ‘even the rats’ had fled; two large, and even more lucrative, blocks to let in central Rome had been part of Terentia’s dowry and in 45 BCE must recently have been returned on the divorce.

But it did not put Cicero into the bracket of the super-rich. In reflecting on the history of extravagance, Pliny the Elder states that in 53 BCE Clodius bought for almost 15 million sesterces the house of Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, one of Cicero’s friends and a somewhat disreputable officer of Pompey’s in Judaea in the 60s BCE.

The remains of its basement have tentatively been identified, also on the Palatine slopes, near where the Arch of Titus still stands; they comprise about fifty small rooms and a bath, probably for slaves, and earlier generations of archaeologists confidently (and wrongly) identified them as a city-centre brothel. At yet another level up, the property of Crassus was worth 200 million sesterces; with that, he could indeed have paid for his own army (p. 26).

The point about the residences of the Roman elite, whether of senators in Rome or of local bigwigs outside it, is that they were not private houses in modern terms; they did not (or not only) represent a place to escape from the public gaze. To be sure, there were some hideaways, such as Cicero’s retreat on Astura, and some parts of the house were more private than others. But in many ways domestic architecture was meant to contribute to the public image and reputation of the prominent Roman, and it was in his house that much public business was done.

parlours-cum-bedrooms (cubicula)