ANCIENT ROMAN CULTURE


URBAN LIFE

Ancient Rome was situated on seven hills and its monumental public buildings - the Colosseum, the Forum of Trajan, and the Pantheon - made the city the "capital of the world" under the emperors. But in addition to the arenas, temples, and forums, Rome also had theaters, basilicas, gymnasiums, baths, taverns, and brothels.

The first emperor, Augustus, had a modest house, but his successors progressively expanded it into an enormous imperial residence on the Palatine Hill from which all "palaces" take their name. The rich preferred to live on the hills above the teeming crowds and animals of central Rome. Rome housed over 1 million inhabitants, so most of its buildings were not villas and splendid monuments.

The poor lived packed into apartment houses near the center of the city since there was no public transport. The public spaces in Rome resounded with such a din of hooves and clatter of iron chariot wheels that Julius Caesar proposed a ban on chariot traffic at night.

One Roman writer said that the imperial government kept the Romans contented by "bread and circuses." Other societies have relied on the same strategy, but never to the same degree. The Roman emperors provided free food to hundreds of thousands and sponsored an endless series of games. For two centuries the government managed to avoid food shortages or the discontent that would endanger the rule of the emperors.

The government gave high priority to acquiring, shipping, storing, and distributing food for Rome and other major urban areas. The Romans had a formidable logistical task to supply Rome's 1 million inhabitants.

The emperors organized convoys from Egypt, North Africa, and Sicily to carry food to urban areas. They generously distributed wheat, which was the staple food of the time. When the emperors improved facilities at Rome's seaport, Ostia, for example, they wanted to ensure a steady supply of wheat to the capital. Italian farms provided fruit and vegetables, but meat and fish were luxuries in an urban society.

The Romans built huge waterways called aqueducts to bring water to the cities and imported large jugs of wine and oil from Spain, Gaul, and Africa to fulfill the necessities of the Roman table.

The emperors used different forms of entertainment to pacify the urban masses, including chariot races, theatrical and musical performances, wild-beast hunts, mock sea battles, public executions, and gladiatorial combat. In the Colosseum, Rome's huge amphitheater, 50,000 Romans could watch the games.

Criminals and captives were sent to gladiatorial training schools so that they learned to entertain the crowds. If gladiators successfully performed in combat, they might earn the support of the crowd and an imperial "thumbs-up," meaning a reprieve and freedom. The crowd could also determine whether the fate of the battle's loser was death. The games were important occasions during which the Roman people could see the emperor, and he could show his respect for them by following their desire to spare a gladiator.

The emperor Titus opened the Colosseum in AD 80 with 100 days of games in which 9,000 animals died. The crowds came to the games to see fighting and blood as well as the color and pageantry of public celebrations. The most popular events were the chariot races held in the Circus Maximus, an arena that held up to 300,000 spectators. Competing teams with brightly decorated horses attracted fierce loyalty, and up to a dozen four-horse chariots crowded together through the dangerous turns, lap after lap. Successful charioteers became so wealthy that even emperors envied their riches.

Historians estimate that about 10 percent of the empire's population lived in the thousand cities that stretched from Britain to Syria: Colchester and London in Britain, Lyon and Arles in Gaul, Timgad and Lepcis Magna in North Africa, to the great eastern cities of Antioch in ancient Syria and Alexandria in Egypt. Most of these cities were rather small, with fewer than 10,000 residents, and only a handful had more than 100,000 inhabitants. Most of the larger urban populations were in the East, but new cities developed in the western provinces as an outgrowth of military settlement and trade. All of these urban centers had a forum and temples, and most also had the same kind of public buildings found in Rome, but on a smaller scale.

Rome administered a vast empire with a small civil service, so the burden of effective government rested on the local elite. Some conquered Greek cities retained their traditional form of government, but many in the western portion of the empire established a municipal council called a curia, named after the Roman Senate. The city council and annually elected officials administered the food supply, public services, religious festivities, town finance, and local building projects. The Romans thus created in these outlying cities a provincial aristocracy modeled on Rome's social system. The imperial government expected local authorities to maintain order by the same social and cultural methods used by Rome. Because of these methods, Roman municipal governments rarely had to dispatch legions to quiet social unrest or rebellion.

Local elites often used their own resources to subsidize public buildings, games, and even the distribution of grain to the poor. They were willing to carry the burden of municipal expenses because they had a strong sense of civic responsibility and a desire to show off their economic success. However, when the empire later declined economically, city officials increasingly avoided their public duties, undermining the entire system of local government. Without the local elite to maintain order and collect taxes, the empire became ungovernable.

In the latter part of the 1st century AD, a recession hit Italy particularly hard. For instance, a case of Italian-style pottery made in Gaul and found unopened at Pompeii shows that Italy was competing with the provinces. An influx of gold from Dacia (present-day Romania) during the reign of the emperor Trajan temporarily reversed the decline of the Italian economy, but prosperity could not last forever. Frontier troubles increased the cost of the army, and the bureaucracy continued its inevitable growth. The empire was no longer expanding, and rising costs far outstripped the limited economic growth possible in a preindustrial economy. By AD 160 economic decline began to imperil the Roman peace that the emperors had worked so hard to maintain.


RURAL LIFE

The cities of the empire had large populations and impressive public buildings, but 90 percent of the emperor's subjects worked in the countryside and lived in flimsy agricultural huts. Land was the only secure investment, so the wealthy owned estates and idealized the peaceful life of the countryside. Yet these same people actually lived in the cities and had a much less romantic view of real peasants. During the empire all written accounts of the countryside, whether sympathetic or hostile, came from the sophisticated urban elite who performed no manual labor.

Since landlords usually resided in cities, estate overseers made life in the countryside very harsh. Agricultural slaves were treated far worse than their urban counterparts who worked in aristocratic households. The conditions in Egypt were particularly bad. Rome inherited the dictatorial system of the Egyptian monarchs, the pharaohs, who ordered the production of huge wheat crops at terrible human cost.

Ancient sources indicate that as many as 42 people occupied one small farm hut in Egypt, while six families owned a single olive tree. Local villagers lived in crushing poverty and had none of the diversions of the city like games, religious festivals, or free distribution of food.

Not surprisingly, many peasants drifted to the cities, and the countryside became depopulated. Emperors initially encouraged small farmers to remain on the land by providing loans, but later used the brutal practices of Egypt to bind the peasants to the soil, foreshadowing a similar practice of forced labor during medieval times.





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