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90tut & Debt to GBreece and 180m2
EDITORS
GeoRGE DEPUE HADzsiTs, PH.D.
University of Pennsylvania
DAVID MooRE Robinson, PH.D., LL.D.
The johns Hopkins University

CONTRIBUTORS TO THE “OUR DEBT TO
GREECE AND ROME FUND,” WHOSE
GENEROSITY HAS MADE POSSIBLE
THE LIBRARY
g|Dut Debt to (Stette and 180me
Philadelphia
DR. ASTLEY P. C. ASHEIURST
JoHN C. BELL
HENRY H. BONNELL
JASPER YEATES BRINTON
GEORGE BURNEIAM, JR.
JoHN CADWALADER
MISS CLARA COMEGYS
MISS MARY E. CONVERSE
ARTHUR G. DICKSON
WILLIAM M. ELKINS
H. H. FURNEss, JR.
WILLIAM P. GEST
JoHN GRIBBEL
SAMUEL F. Houston
CHARLES EDWARD INGERSOLL
JoBN STORY JENKS
ALBA B. JoHNSON
MISS NINA LEA
GEORGE McFADDEN
MRS. JoHN MARKOE
JULEs E. MASTBAUM
J. WAUGHAN MERRICK
EFFINGHAM B. MORRIS
WILLIAM R. MURPHY
JoHN S. NEWBOLD
S. DAVIS PAGE (memorial)
Owen J. ROBERTS
Joseph G. RoseNGARTEN
WILLIAM C. SPROUL
JoHN B. STETSON, JR.
DR. J. WILLIAM WHITE
(memorial)
GEORGE D. WIDENER
MRs. JAMES D. WINSOR
OWEN WISTER
The Philadelphia Society
for the Promotion of Liberal
Studies.
Boston
ORIC BATEs (memorial)
FREDERICK P. FISH
WILLIAM AMORY GARDNER
Joseph CLARK HoPPIN
Chicago
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Cincinnati
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Cleveland
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Detroit
JoHN W. ANDERSON
DEXTER M. FERRY, JR.
Doylestown, Pennsylvania
“A LOVER OF GREECE AND
ROME”
New York
JoHN JAY CHAPMAN
WILLARD V. KING
THOMAS W. LAMONT
DwighT W. MoRRow
MRs. D. W. MoRRow
ELIHU ROOT
MORTIMER L. SCHIFF
WILLIAM SLOANE
GEORGE W. WICKERSHAM
And one contributor, who
has asked to have his name
withheld:
Maecenas atavis edite regibus,
O et praesidium et dulce decus
7%014%.
Washington
The Greek Embassy at
Washington, for the Greek
Government.
[ii
R O M A N P RIVATE LIFE
A N D I T S S U RV I V A. L. S
BY
WALTON BROOKS McDANIEL, Ph.D.
PROFESSOR OF LATIN
University of Pennsylvania
MARSHALL JONES COMPANY
BOSTON - MASSACHUSETTS

c OPYRIGHT - I g 24 • B Y MAR SHALL J O NES COMPANY
All rights reserved
Printed December, 1924
T H E PLIM PTO N P R E S S • N O R W O O D → M A S S A C H U S E TTS
PR IN T E D IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S OF A M E R I C A
&cr.
6., 5, ».*e-z-y
/ — /3'--.57
CORINNAE
COMITI MEAE ET OMNIUM PEREGRINATIONUM
MEARUM SOCIAE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
II.
III.
IV.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
CoNTRIBUTORs To THE FUND
PREFACE .
THE HOME .
FURNITURE .
THE HouseHoLD .
MATRIMONY
BIRTH AND CHILDHooD
CLOTHING
GoDs .
DAILY LIFE
SocIAL LIFE
AMUSEMENTS
TRAVEL .
STREET-LIFE
BURIAL
BIBLIOGRAPHY .
PAGE
11
ix
3
17
23
4.I
6o
8I
IOI
Ioé
II6
. . I4. I
I68
I79
I86
I99
[vii |
PREFACE

WRITER who should attempt to
show the influence of Roman private
- life upon the modern world would
have to unite a specialist's familiarity with
antiquity with a wide knowledge of the inter-
vening centuries through which that influence
might be traced. In addition, he ought to
have spent at least one normal lifetime in
each of the Latin countries. In these, at any
rate, survivals are more easily detected and
their history more definitely determined. Now,
inasmuch as the editors’ chance of finding
a Methuselah possessed of such a combination
of erudition and experience seemed somewhat
remote, they had to seek as their alternative
someone who had specialized in the field of
private antiquities and yet would have the
complaisance, or, if you will, the temerity to
undertake a task of only less effrontery than
that which the scheme of the Series seems
primarily to demand. One might conceivably
tell the tale of Roman life within the compass
of a small book for general readers and at
[ix]
P RE FA C E
the same time indicate certain parallels be-
tween the life of antiquity and that of today
which might or might not be an unbroken
tradition from that remote period. To this
lesser task the author has reluctantly directed
his feeble powers; for the goddesses IIeu669 and
Suada both intervened to his undoing. Fortu-
nately during more than twenty-five years he
had devoted many visits and several consider-
able stays in Latin countries to the collection
of parallels between the present and the past.
How little can be accomplished by a foreigner
in such a period, even though he travels ex-
tensively and lives among the ordinary people
with the set purpose of making his observa-
tions and collections, needs no other demon-
stration than this little treatise affords.
If the author has limited his sources almost
entirely to Italy, it is because there the ma-
terial is more abundant and instructive, and
because he hoped that his love for a country
that he regards almost as a second home might
assure him an especial insight. A sympathetic
appreciation of such a responsive race as the
Italian will at any rate spare an investigator
certain blunders of interpretation and grant
him opportunities to learn that are denied the
[x]
P R E FA C E
captious and the squeamish. That I have
escaped all errors of understanding even in
the limited selection that I have made from
my collections is unlikely. To Commendatore
H. Blakiston Wilkins of Florence and his
family I am indebted for passing critically
upon much of this manuscript; their knowl-
edge of Italian life is so unusual as to consti-
tute a valuable protection for one attempting
my treacherous task.
Scholars writing for ordinary readers will
always disagree as to the amount of space to
be assigned various topics in what is at best
a hopelessly brief account of Roman private
life, nor can any writer, congesting the data
of various periods to form a composite picture
to fit the generations just before and just after
the birth of Christ, avoid generalizations that
he himself knows perfectly well are open to
debate. That, however, makes the work of
the reviewer easier, and one must be kind even
to reviewers.
But even if one avoids anachronisms, there is
still the danger that statements may be true of
only a portion of the people at any given time.
This book deals in the main with the life of
the upper classes of the capital of the Roman
[ xi )
P R E FA C E
world, the people with whom the student of
Roman art and literature is chiefly concerned.
The extent that the excavations of Ostia and
Pompeii serve even this purpose needs no dis-
cussion here. The book might well accompany
the visitor to such ruins, if he has no better
help; but neither he nor the lover of Roman
literature should expect from it any interpre-
tation of the inner life of the ancient people.
It deals primarily with the material existence
and not with the thoughts and feelings of the
Romans. It is bad enough to picture wrongly,
as all writers are sure at times to do, the ex-
ternals of ancient life; to misrepresent the
spirit is worse. And finally some may wish
that the author had put his material into the
dramatic, story-book form which others with
ampler space at their command have adopted.
It seemed, however, preferable to compact the
multitudinous facts into a booklet that should
be serviceable to those, for instance, who read
their Classics in the Translations of The Loeb
Classical Library, rather than to essay any
special entertainment of such readers as might
never have grown up.
[ xii I
ROMAN PRIVATE LIFE AND
ITS SURVIVALS
ROMAN PRIVATE LIFE
AND ITS SURVIVALS
I. THE HOME
IRST of all we may turn our attention
to the sort of habitation into which the
Roman of our sketch might be born.
The ordinary style of house construction used
in Italy has depended upon factors some of
which, such as climate and available building
materials, have varied but little in thousands
of years, while others have changed with the
increasing complexity of civilization and the
general advance in inventions throughout the
world. The survivals from Roman times,
however, seem to the Classicist who looks
for them in his travels through the peninsula
Surprisingly numerous.
Our museums contain cinerary urns which
Italians of prehistoric ages who practiced cre-
mation of their dead fashioned to resemble
the homes of the living. These hut urns ac-
[3]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
quaint us with a form of single-room dwelling,
at first round, later oval, and eventually
rectangular, built with wattled walls and a
roof of thatch, and entered and often wholly
lighted by a single door, the like of which
may still be seen in many parts of Italy. For
example in any capanna on Monte Circeo the
birds whose crowing at the dawn of day’s fos-
tering light roused Evander from his humble
home would find the same cock-roost that
Virgil had in mind as he penned his verses
in the Aeneid, as I can attest from having
taken shelter in just such a wigwam after the
owner with a delicate sense of hospitality had
first ejected the family pig. The furnishing
of the dim interior reminded me of the time
when the Roman household dwelt in such a
single room, with that promiscuous intimacy
that poverty-stricken districts of Italy still
exemplify. A central fireplace served for
cooking, for the sacrificial offerings of religion,
and, one might add, to keep the eyes moist
with tears; for the smoke had only a small
aperture in the roof or, in default of that, the
open door through which to waft both the
savor of food and the breath of prayer.
Around this hearth the women would do their
[4]
T H E H O M E
spinning and weaving, if the rain denied them
the more agreeable workshop of all outdoors.
Hard pallet beds at night received the tired
household, who could have been no more
fastidious about ventilation, Smells and insects
than their pastoral descendants of the twen-
tieth century.
Theorizing about the development of this
primitive cabin into the comfortable dwelling
of the middle-class people which we find so
well preserved at Pompeii and have reason
to believe was usual in Rome also, raises de-
batable questions that stir pleasantly the acri-
mony of scholars but need no discussion here.
The ground floor plan of the type of Pom-
peian house that should chiefly interest the
general reader is double. The front or atrium-
half of the edifice is probably of Etruscan
origin, the back undoubtedly of Greek. The
houses were built to the street-line with no
front or side yard anywhere. Their stucco
façades were broken with relatively few and
small windows, for the most part in the second
story or high above the reach of thieves in
the first. Balconies or bays often overhung
from the upper floor, as we are now learning
from the recent excavations at Pompeii. The
[5]
R O M A N P R IV A T E L II" E
entrance door was commonly at the end of a
shallow vestibule. Thus the entire house
seemed to be looking inward, while our ability
to roll much larger sheets of glass enables
us to make dwellings that look outward
through ample windows and doors and even
through Sun-parlors and glass conservatories.
To this architectural introspection is largely
due that air of Oriental seclusion which so
impresses a visitor to the ruins.
The forepart of our typical Pompeian home
consists of a rectangular hall into which open
rooms on either side that were originally used
for bed-chambers, but which with changing
customs often served as store rooms or for
other purposes. The farthest rooms from the
front entry on each side were the so-called
“wings.” These alae resembled alcoves in
being without doors and wholly open to the
central hall. In the city mansions of the
nobility they might be used for the display
of the ancestral busts, in niches in their walls.
Directly opposite the entrance of the atrium
and also wholly open to it was a capacious
1 Windows without panes of glass are a common sight
in south Italy as they were of old. In the thirteenth
century even palaces in northern Italy lacked glass. See
L. Reggiani, Strenna Guastellese, p. 3.
[6]
T H E H O M E
apartment. This the master of the house used
as a reception-room and office. By its central
position it commanded all the activities of
the home. Among its furnishings was a
strong-box or safe, firmly bolted to a base of
cement. In this would be kept the valuables
which we may now store away in safe-deposit
vaults. The quality of the mosaic floor and
of the mural paintings as well as of the dra-
peries which might curtain both the front and
a rear opening of this room marked it out
as one of the handsomest in the whole build-
ing. Along its side ran the passage that con-
nected the two divisions of the house, and the
room parallel to it on either side was likely
to be a dining-room with an entrance into the
other half of the house.
The ceiling of the atrium regularly had a
large rectangular opening through which rain
would fall from the roofs of tile, sloping in-
ward. The tiles were of precisely the same
construction as those now in use in Italy
wherever snow * does not make their weight
insupportable nor earthquakes dangerous.
The rain-hole let in considerable light and also
* As at Agerola some four thousand feet above the
bay at Castellamare di Stabia, where the roofs of wood
resemble the Swiss.
[7]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
assured an abundance of Soft water much ap-
preciated for washing purposes. Its frame-
work might have the Support of four or more
columns. These rose from the edge of a shal-
low basin which caught the Supply of rain
and let off the overflow through piping into
large cisterns beneath the floor. The basin
itself might be adorned with a fountain-jet in
the middle or at the inner end, so that even
on sunny days there would be that plash of
falling water that Italians still love to have
in the courtyards of their homes.
Just as today in any Italian palace the
ground floor apartments facing the street may
be devoted to business uses,” so at Pompeii
even in finer residences the rooms on each
side of the entrance passage were often shops,
the wares of which might be supplied from
workrooms in the dwelling itself. Their entire
interior was exposed to view during the day
and the counter edged the sidewalk so that
customers could trade across it without enter-
ing. Since the front at night was protected
by board shutters, a Pompeian business street
would, therefore, again remind one of the
3 For the Tuscan palace with its canova or cantina
See L. Villari, Italian Life in Town and Country, p. 25.
[8]
T H E H O M E
Orient, although just such shops with over-
head awnings are still common also in parts
of Greece and Italy. At Palermo, for example,
there is at least one street largely lined with
tiny restaurants, the odors from which are
free to pour up and down the crowded thor-
oughfare as an advertisement or as a warning
to possible customers, an exact reproduction
of the Pompeian cook shops. Dwellings with-
out stoves and chimneys have been the rule
in much of Italy from the beginning, and to
have the cooking done away from home is
still commonly a convenience if not a neces-
sity. The shops often had a half-story or
mezzanine floor to which stairs ascended at
their rear. These are exactly duplicated also in
the arrangements of small shops in Naples.
The owner sleeps upstairs above his goods.
As the front apartments of the house de-
rived their light and air almost wholly from
the atrium-aperture, so those in the rear di-
vision depended upon a colonnaded, rectangular
court which gives the name peristyle to this
Greek portion of the dwelling. By superim-
posing another colonnade they could secure
an open gallery to light and give access to the
upstairs rooms. These apartments in large
[9]
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
houses might be let to lodgers as flats. The
court was normally laid out in flower-beds
and embellished by garden-statuary, fountain-
basins, and in the middle a deep pool with a
central fountain, an enviable provision for
the small boy who here had none of the
handicaps of hampering clothing and fussy
parents that prevent the happy conversion of
a bath-tub into an ocean of ships. Open
courts are, of course, no rarity in Mediterra-
nean lands today, where their combination of
fresh air and Sunshine with privacy are duly
valued.
Around this patio the Pompeian located the
more domestic apartments, the dining-rooms,”
kitchen, larder, water-closet, bath and cells
for the slaves. Here, too, might be the stable
with no more regard for hygiene than in many
an Italian locanda where the guests have only
a floor or wall between them and the stalls.
The family sleeping-chambers would be in the
peristyle, either in the first or in a second
story. Such a second floor in fact might be
4 The ancient use of different dining-rooms and bed-
chambers according to the exposure to the sun which
summer or winter made desirable anticipates a practice
of modern times in Venetian palaces. See W. D. Howells,
Venetian Life, 2nd. Ed., pp. 4I and 391.
[ Io
T EI E H O M E
built over single rooms or groups of rooms in
any part of the house; for the ancient archi-
tect was as indifferent to filling out, so to
speak, the various strata of a dwelling as he
was to making all parts of the same story of
equal height. There are sometimes three or
four levels in the lower story at Pompeii; but
the rooms generally remind us of modern
Italian apartments in being high-studded.
This accords with an architectural tradition
that has never lapsed, that dwellings should
be built with a view to comfort rather in sum-
mer than in winter. To kiln-dried Americans
a winter in Sunny Italy is an Arctic experience.
But we must not forget that in much of it
there are really two winters, one of chill and
rain, and a second, a “summer-winter ’’ that
for three or four months almost suspends
outdoor work of man and beast by the severity
of its heat.
In the peristyle portion of the house were
also located some of the finest apartments for
social purposes, beautified by superior mural
paintings and by carefully laid mosaic floors.
Luxurious residences might also include sep-
arate rooms for works of art and a library
furnished with cases to contain the parchment
[ II |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I R E
and papyrus rolls and with statues and busts
to indicate the occupant's esthetic and literary
predilections. Even the Sun-parlor is no new
invention, nor is the value of a bath in it as
a therapeutic agent appreciated for the first
time in these days. During the winter period
Romans used to resort to a roof terrace (like
the aerial gardens that are so common on
Italian houses wherever the climate permits),
an open loggia, or Some other basking-place,
with the same pleasure that they took in
going to their cold water bath during tropical
heat. At the rear of the house there was in
some cases a garden plot for the cultivation
of ornamental vegetation or of useful vege-
tables, nor must we forget that a dwelling
often had the enlargement of extra atria and
peristyles.
The kitchen deserves a special word not
only because it was likely to contain a shrine
for the household gods instead of being as now
in the United States the profanest apartment
of the house, but because the hearth arrange-
ments are easily duplicated in contemporary
Italy. A fire of charcoal is nested in cavities
in the upper surface of what we might call a
range. Where wood was plentiful the ancients
[I2 |
T H E H O M E
kindled faggots on the hearth. The mere
sight of such a contracted kitchen and prim-
itive cooker, if in fact the smoke struggling
for an exit through some hole * in the wall
vouchsafed any eyesight at all, would put our
pampered servants to a speedy flight. Of
course, the Romans did their best with char-
coal and with a specially prepared smokeless
wood to minimize the fumes. What that
best was can be surmised from the miracle
that the poor of Italy still perform with in-
credibly little fuel and a fan to keep it hot.
We have now described in briefest outline
the ordinary home of a prosperous Pompeian.
But it is needless to say that at Rome there
were not only dwellings similar to these but
also private residences of the wealthy, the
lofty halls and magnificent courts of which
can best be imagined after a visit to the ruins
of the imperial palaces themselves. In such,
for instance, the vestibule becomes a portico
with sculpture and other splendid adornment,
while the marble veneering of wall surfaces
all over the building can be adequately ap-
5 We can allow neither Shakespeare in his Julius Caesar
nor Sienkiewicz in his Quo Vadis to picture chimneys on
the dwellings of ancient Rome. They are still rare in
many Italian communities.
[I3]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
preciated only after one has seen the finer
churches of Rome which owe their beauty to
transfers of ancient splendor.
There were also at the capital abodes of
wretchedness, great tenement houses, so poorly
constructed that their tumbling was no phe-
nomenal event. Being bounded by four
streets, they were called “islands,” insulae.
Like the huge lodging houses of Naples they
might have a single shrine for the worship
of the entire tenantry. The inhabitants cer-
tainly needed the unifying influence of religion
as much as do those of the bassi and of the
still worse fondaci today. A large family
might eat, sleep and slave in a single room
or in a few-room flat, in the same demoraliz-
ing congestion as there used to be in the
rookeries of American cities before restrictive
building laws were passed and inspectors
ceased to wink. In ancient Rome also legis-
lation fixed the maximum height of buildings,
now at seventy feet and again at sixty, but
even edifices of the former limit would hardly
qualify as modern skyscrapers. Of lodging
houses of the superior sort the newer excava-
tions at Ostia are now giving uS Some idea.
They seem very modern.
[14]
T H E H O M E
A superficial observer at Pompeii is likely
to exclaim: “Here certainly every man’s
house is his castle,” but the privacy must
have been only apparent. While there would
be no embarrassment from strangers staring
through windows on the street, the ancients
were sometimes troubled by having their
neighbors peer from above through the rain-
hole of the atrium or into the peristyle court.
The former, indeed, had to be closed with a
grating as a protection against descending
thieves, quite as we might safeguard a sky-
light. Moreover, the abundance of domestic
slaves speaking a Babel of different tongues
inevitably caused noise and confusion. In
big establishments we hear of special “silence
makers,” silentarii, “mufflers ” we might call
them, who were expected to keep their fellow-
servants quiet, and we can well understand
why literary workers were inclined to seek
the calmer and ampler quarters of their
country villas. -
So far as interior decoration is concerned,
the mosaic pavements, fresco-paintings and
plastic work in stucco which delight the artis-
tic visitor to Pompeii were naturally carried
to higher perfection in the nobler mansions
[I5]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
of the capital, but their wide-spread use in the
little Campanian town evidences an esthetic
interest upon the part of the masses of which
Italians still have some right to boast. Their
fondness for work in plaster, for marble and
for fresco-painting is a long tradition: the
best that they do is still unsurpassed.
[16]
II. FURNITURE

NCIENT furniture was notable more
for the artistic taste and costly ma-
terials displayed in its construction
than for its abundance and comfort. Even
now Italy has no such exacting cult of ease
and convenience as is general in the United
States. But the carving of the furniture and
the inlaid work in ivory, metal and tortoise-
shell already gave promise of what our Italian
craftsman can do with these materials. To
be sure, anciently the inspiration and much
of the workmanship were probably Greek.
The larger pieces in the home of the upper
classes comprised their rather high beds, low
dinner-sofas, reading and writing couches,
chairs, stools, tables, chests, upright cabinets
or cupboards, and a cradle for the never-fail-
ing baby. Minor articles included writing
implements and materials,” the same sort of
child’s saving bank " that encourages thrift
6 Already in Ovid's day lovers were using invisible inks
to protect their billets-doux from prying eyes.
7 Those found at Pompeii resemble closely the carused-
da or salvadanai of the Sicilians as they are pictured by
[I7]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L L F E
today, musical instruments, the lyre, the pipes,
the tambourine, and among the rich even a
water-organ. Nor must we leave out the bag-
pipe which is still a favorite among the peas-
ants of Sicily. In various parts of Italy it
has long been played with the piffero, or pas-
toral pipe, before the street-shrines of the
Madonna in the Christmas season, with the
same spirit of homage that in Ovid's day in-
spired the devotees of the Mother of the
Gods to shrill their horns before her. Lighting
and heating required lanterns, lamps,” cande-
labra and portable braziers which were
precisely like those in common use in the great
galleries and palaces of Italy — memorials
rather than producers of heat one might call
them. For kindling the hearth they used
fire-sticks or the flint and steel, together with
sulphured matches and other tinder. Then
there were sun-dials and now and then a
water-clock which worked on the principle of
our hour-glasses. We may add to our list the
G. Pitré, Catalogo Illustrato della Mostra Etnografica
Siciliana (1892), p. 39, No. 118.
8 Inscriptions on some wishing the owner a “Happy
New Year” make them seem like our modern presents
for that season. Olive oil is still burned in country
districts in lamps of much the same shape as those of
two thousand years ago.
[ 18 |
F U R N IT U R E
toilet articles,” including such refinements as
tooth-picks, ear-picks, nail files and hair
tweezers; the domestic equipment for cleans-
ing, Such as brooms, brushes and sponges; the
cooking and eating utensils, not overlooking
Such niceties as cake moulds and egg beaters
and a nursing bottle for the baby; and finally
articles used in exercise and for the bath. In
what category one should place the back-
scratcher may be dubious, but its utility is
obvious to anyone who knows Italian hexa-
pods. Our long list reads much more like the
equipment of a modern house than the lay-
man might have imagined.
One piece of silver plate even a poor family
might own, the salt-cellar, containing the im-
portant ingredient of the mola salsa or sacri-
ficial cake. Even yet it has hardly lost its
ranking position of all the tableware. Of
course, the wealthy vied with one another in
the possession of vessels of costly metal and
of artistic beauty. Extant specimens almost
justify envy. Another token of wealth, the
° The hair-pin had but a single prong and might
be adorned at the other end with the representation of
a hand the outstretched fingers of which were supposed
to avert the evils of witchcraft. South Italian and
Sicilian women display the same type to this day.
[I9 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L IF E
Oriental rug, was not yet in use on Italian
floors, but curtains, spreads and draperies
were a common importation from the East
long before imperial times.
Only persons of means, especially in the
more northern provinces of the empire, would
have hot-air heating systems for the living
rooms of the house, but everywhere bath
apartments depended upon a furnace to send
warmth through register-like openings into a
chamber, or more commonly, to circulate it
through double walls and hollow floorings. In
general Italians still prefer the gratuitous but
fitful heat of the sun to the costly emanations
of a fuel fire.
Water was piped into the dwellings from a
city supply brought in by aqueducts and dis-
tributed by city mains. Some of these aque-
ducts are still in use in whole or in part. To
secure pressure, water towers were used, such
as may still be seen in Palermo, for instance,
as well as in ancient Pompeii. Cisterns for
rain water were also a dependence, as they
still are in more waterless sections of the pen-
insula. The poor had to resort, of course, to
street fountains, as in most Italian communi-
ties of today. The carrying of water jars on
| 20 |
F U R N IT U R E
their heads has made living caryatides of
Italian girls for thousands of years. The
young mother was and is at her prettiest when
balancing in a basket on her head her chubby
baby, lulled to slumber by the swaying
movement.
Amulets were also among the furnishings of
an ancient home. Not a few will still catch
the eye of a keen observer in humbler dwell-
ings of Italy. While two millennia ago the
superstitious warded off the maleficence of
magic by making finger-signs that Italians
still use against a momentary danger, yet per-
manent charms on one's person " or on one's
possessions would seem to have advantages
over any temporary gesture. Thus, on the
homeopathic principle perhaps of using like
versus like, a representation of the human
eye was frequently to be found on all sorts of
objects, especially upon pottery. If the evil
eye really has anything to do with the Smash-
10 A Neapolitan professor of the Classics introduced
himself to one of my students to inquire what sort of
amulet his Phi Beta Kappa key was. Trinkets that rep-
resent the sign of the “horns” or of the “fig ’’ have
several millennia of precedents behind them; so, too, the
sea-horse or hippocamp in the neighborhood of Naples,
although now it is outranked in popularity by the cima-
ruta and sirena.
[21 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L IF E
ing of our household china, we may well
redecorate both cook and kitchen. The gro-
tesque, the comical and the obscene were par-
ticularly efficacious against the glance of envy
or of any other evil influence, catching it and
averting it, one might say, as a lightning rod
the thunderbolt. We must not, therefore, draw
wrong conclusions” from the presence on
Pompeian houses of symbols that we deem
indecent to a degree. The practice is not quite
dead yet in that region, but none the less the
people using such safeguards are and were
quite respectable.
11 As, for instance, André Maurel, A Fortnight in
Naples, translated by H. Gerard, p. 211, misjudges the
famous house of the Vettii at Pompeii, which has a
shocking fora-fascino at the very front door.
[22 ||
III. THE HOUSEHOLD

E must next occupy ourselves with
the men, women and children who
dwelt in this home. From our
point of view, they would seem to overcrowd
it. The Latin noun from which our word
family is derived might be better represented
in English by the term “house” or “house-
hold *; for, especially among the earlier Ro-
mans, several generations of the same lineage
often lived together in the same abode. Sim-
ilarly today in Italy, two or three sets of
husband, wife and children will dwell under
the same roof-tree, and the expression la mia
famiglia includes the servants. Clannishness
and nepotism are the natural result of this
intra-mural intimacy, and were in evidence
anciently.
The paterfamilias or head of the house
would be the oldest of the fathers. Subject
absolutely to his power, whether they abode
in his home, or, as sometimes happened in
the case of his descendants, elsewhere, would
[23]
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
be not only his own wife and their unmarried
children, but also his married sons, whether
by birth or by adoption, together with their
wives and all the next generations on the same
principle, so long as he lived. A maiden
daughter escaped his rule only by becoming
a Vestal Virgin (not exactly an ancient nun,
since she could wed after thirty years) or by
marrying into a similar absolutism in another
family; a son by becoming a special priest,
or by a complicated legal process of emanci-
pation. Not at all unlike this system is the
government of many a large group of kins-
people in Tuscany today where the capoccio
or head man and the massaia or house-mother
Settle everything from business to matrimony,
the ultimate word, however, resting with the
male, as it did with Adam until Eve was born.
The importance of this household hegemony
and of the perpetuation of the family can
hardly be overestimated. The Roman thought
of the spirits of the dead as hovering around
the spot where their mortal relics lay, depend-
ent for their felicity upon regular offerings
of food and drink to be given them by their
survivors. In default of descendants or of
those who acted in their capacity, the dead
[24]
T H E H O U S E H O L D
were doomed to a joyless existence which
might easily turn them into demons full of
malice towards the world. On the other hand,
souls that were well treated would keep watch
and ward over their benefactors. To be child-
less, therefore, was to be accursed, not to
marry was to defraud generations of ancestors
of their due. However burdensome, marriage
was less an evil than that which it sought to
avoid. If it proved to be barren, the husband
could yet fulfill his religious obligations to
the dead by choosing one of two alternatives:
he might have himself adopted into another
family where there were heirs or — the pref-
erable method—himself adopt a son.
The absolute power that the head of a house
could exercise over his dependants not only
gave him the complete disposal of all property
that they might earn or acquire, but even per-
mitted him to decide whether a new-born
baby should be deprived of life or reared,
whether a penalty for disobedience should be
some mild punishment or (at least in early
days) enslavement, banishment or death. Of
course, in actual practice we must not think
of the Romans as either robbing or killing
members of their own family. The paterfa-
[25 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
milias was rather a judge with invited assessors
than a practising tyrant. Even the law gradu-
ally set some restrictions, and public opinion
always imposed restraints. Just as in France
the question of a divorce, as involving not
merely a couple but all their connections, calls
for a family council, so among the ancient
Romans not only divorce but all severer puni-
tory measures required the summoning of
friends and relatives to consider the justice
and advisability of them, the Italian consiglio
di famiglia. The life of the home was appar-
ently no more contentious than it averages to-
day, but the respect for elders and especially
for parents would seem to us more Chinese
than American.
The one human element that was responsible
perhaps for the greatest difference between
our life and that of antiquity was the slave.
To him we must now devote a major amount
of attention. An American visiting the homes
of well-to-do families in Italy and to a less
degree living in the more pretentious hotels
of that country is impressed by the minute
division of labor among the servants and by
their consequent excess in number. Tasks of
outdoor work also employ what seems to us
| 26 |
T H E H O U S E H O L D
far too many hands. One might imagine that
the economic conditions of the present had
never diverged much from those traditional
in the days of human slavery. To be sure,
the first Romans had no such superfluity of
unpaid assistance as wealthier citizens of the
Empire were to have. It was not, indeed,
until the conquests of the second century B.C.
had brought countless prisoners of war in
servitude to Rome that the institution of
slavery got its strangle-hold upon the people.
Thenceforth there was an increasing degrada-
tion of free labor. By the close of the Re-
public, in fact, all manual occupations, most
of the trades and even some of what we now
term the professions, such as medicine and
surgery, were largely in the hands of slaves
and ex-slaves, and it meant social debasement
for a freeman of birth and education to com-
pete with them, even if he could with any
financial profit.
We cannot deal here with the larger eco-
nomic changes, the diminution and practical
disappearance of a middle class, the enlistment
of potentially productive thousands in the
army, the increase of the idle protelariat con-
centrated in the cities and more especially in
[27 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
the capital, calling for panem et circenses,
“free bread and the games of the circus,”
quite as more recent commoners have insisted
on having their three F’s, festa, fuoco (fire-
works), farina.” We can only mention the
fusion of small farms, once tilled by independ-
ent, self-respecting farmers, into enormous
estates, worked by slaves and cursed by the
same evils of absentee landlordism that Italy
still exhibits on its latifondi. Nor can we
discuss the lives and occupations of the nu-
merous public slaves. We are rather con-
cerned with the effect of slavery upon the
individual home. -
The personal attentions of ubiquitous, obse-
quious menials are sure in any age to impair
the fibre of manhood and induce in woman-
hood false standards of luxury and pride. Ro-
man children of sterling ancestry in the close
confines of the home had constant and un-
escapable contacts with at least the alien and
often the immoral ideas and conduct of men
and women debased by servitude. Slaves had
every inducement to pamper their young
charges and encourage an egotism that spells
1? The maxim of Lorenzo the Magnificent ran: Pane
e feste tengon il popol quieto.
[ 28 J
T H E H O U S E H O L D
ruin. While there were thousands of families
where there would be no slave or possibly only
one, as soon as you reached the level of what
would be called polite society, there was a
different tale to tell, particularly during the
early Empire. Then even a modest establish-
ment needed a minimum of ten servants to
meet the requirements of gentility and a real
palace might house its hundreds.” To have
the same person serving as major domo and
cook called forth the sneers of a Cicero.
Gossips asked not “How much money is so
and so worth?” but “How many slaves does
he keep?”
In the larger mansions the army of domes-
tics had to be divided into squads of ten, each
with its own supervisor, and that master had,
indeed, a retentive memory who could call by
name a majority of his own servitors. Under
these circumstances a certain absence of sym-
pathy was inevitable, although for the most
part self-interest and the requirements of
peace and quiet in such a crowded household
18 Those who have kept house under the somewhat
similar conditions that minute division of labor creates
in contemporary Italian households sense the full signifi-
cance of the proverb: qui vuol esser mal servito, tenga
assai famiglia.
[29]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
made the Roman master accord his domestic
workers tolerable treatment, while his own
body-servants and private Secretary might
command from him a sincere affection. The
enfranchisement of a slave girl in order to
marry her was not at all unheard of among
decent people. Instances of loyalty and de-
votion parallel those of aged retainers * in
certain Italian families of today, not to speak
of house-Servants in our own South before the
Civil War.
While a hundred dollars, the wages of a few
weeks of recalcitrant, unskilled labor in our
kitchens, would buy outright a competent
manual laborer in Rome of two millennia ago,
thousands were necessary to secure a fancy
article, a handsome boy to wait at table, a
girl to sing or play the lyre on occasion but
to look pretty all the time, or even — such was
the Roman discernment of real worth! — a
grammarian, a eunuch or a fool.
Both the elementary school teacher and the
paedagogus or tutor who helped the boy with
** The attitude of servants is, however, changing so
rapidly in Italy that such relationships as e.g. M. Car-
michael, In Tuscany, pp. 6, 49 ff., 58 ff., and 67, pictures
with delightful charm, will soon be known only in novels
of the past.
[3o
T H E H O U S E H O L D
his lessons and chaperoned him from morn
till night were likely to be Greek slaves. In
controlling their charges these men had to de-
pend on corporal punishment rather than upon
moral suasion; for children soon learned the
normal Roman’s ill-concealed contempt for
the people across the Adriatic. This method
of foreignizing youth is perpetuated in our
age by the system of governesses. Moreover,
the unmarried Italian girl of social standing
is still never to be seen unaccompanied on the
streets. It is quite possible, too, that if she
had the middle-class privilege of going to
school with her brothers, some attendant might
carry her lesson books, as in the good old days
of Rome. So firm stands the fabric of social
convention against the seismic shocks of
progress!
Slaves who had been trained to various arts
and crafts were often a source of income to
their owner, who let them out to those who
stood in need of their skill or labor or lent
them capital to conduct a business of their
own. Experienced slaves also kept the ac-
counts of the household, superintended the
shops or workrooms and labored in them,
bought the daily provisions and the more per-
[31 ||
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
manent supplies, no small task where there
were so many to feed and clothe, and when
there were no department stores like ours pro-
viding anything from a needle to a carriage.
Furthermore, every branch of the household
economy had to have its own specialist, the
kitchen, dining-rooms, and bed-chambers. The
very house door would prepare you for what
you would note inside; for there was the tiny
office of a slave who had naught to do but
guard the entrance, the prototype of the mod-
ern porter,” but, unlike him, sometimes
chained to his post to insure his presence.
The toilet of the ladies demanded the skill of
experts too numerous to list, but husband and
children were hardly less exacting in their
needs of specialists to cut and dress their hair,
bathe and clothe their persons, and answer
every beck and call as errand boys.
Fashion prescribed a retinue of servants on
the streets, even if one were not borne along
in a litter, shaded by sun-umbrellas, paged by
handsome boys and cooled by fans of palm
15 This functionary, humble and yet all-powerful either
to vex or to serve and please, is likely nowadays to carry
on some petty supplementary employment while seated at
the entrance, such as the repairing of shoes or the vending
of flowers.
[32 |
T H E H O U S E H O L D
leaf or of peacock plumes, held in the hands
of flunkies. So travelled the rich, who gave
to the liveries of their bearers and to the
comfort of their litters the same attention that
the privileged few can still give to the equip-
ment of their sedans and limousines. A trip
out of the city set a small army of servants
on the march, carriage drivers and outriders,
persons to care for the baggage in the wagons
and on the beasts of burden, not to mention
in some cases private soldiery, a band of
gladiators to protect the traveller against
bandits or against the similar bravos of their
political opponents. There were, to be sure,
those like Horace and like many a happy but
hardy tourist of today who could travel long
distances on donkey back with the nuisance
of but few attendants, but such was not the
liberty of the social élite of Rome at the be-
ginning of our era. Nor can we omit from
our enumeration a whole class of ancient ser-
vitors whose modern representatives must be
seen chiefly on the vaudeville stage, at the
circus or in some museum. We refer to those
slaves whose personal oddities or deformities,”
16 One of the most persistent traits in Italian char-
acter seems to be their sense of the ridiculous. They
have always been prone to personalities, quick to coin
[33]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
gifts of comic Speech or action, or musical or
histrionic ability made them welcome enter-
tainers at dinner parties. They might be of
either sex and of any age, and their perform-
ances ran from the level of obscenities and
vulgarities such as now enthrall our lowest
audiences to the highest reaches of dramatic
art, to the reading, for instance, of a master-
piece of literature to a group of cultivated
gentlemen.
Slaves constituted such a considerable ele-
ment of the populace that the life they led
and the treatment they received is of concern
to any student of antiquity. Within recent
years labor has won so much from capital
and working conditions in most civilized
countries have been so bettered that we may
find difficulty in visualizing the lot to which
a slave was born or to which a foreigner might
be reduced through financial adversity or the
vicissitudes of war. A marked difference in
color and civilization separated our recent
slaveholders from their human chattels.
Among them there was more irony but less
apt nicknames and tolerant of both. Barbieri would
have been called by the Latin equivalent of Guercino and
Barbarelli by that of Giorgione, had they lived in Ro-
man days.
[34]
T H E H O U S E H O L D
cruelty in christening a negro “Caesar ” or
“Pompey’” than in re-naming a Greek prisoner
of war “Croesus ” after his enslavement by
some Roman who was his inferior in birth,
breeding and education.
Of course, some slaves were born to Servi-
tude, others owed their fate to punishment
for having tried to escape some civic duty or
for having played the “slacker’’ in time of
war. By the first century A.D. Romans were
securing their chief supply of them through
purchase in the open market, where they would
be exposed naked on the auction platform to
be duly handled, trotted about, and tested by
the prospective purchaser; for even a pro-
fessional swapper of horses might learn from
these ancient dealers how to conceal infirmi-
ties and inefficiencies.
Chalked feet meant that the slave was
newly imported, holes in his ears that he was
an Oriental, a label hung round his neck that
he was warranted, a cap on his head that he
was not. The points usually covered by the
guarantee were that he was Sound of mind
and body, with no tendency to epilepsy or
suicide, nor propensity to thieve or run away.
A slavemaster's power was absolute. Sig-
[35]
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
nificant is an ancient classification of agricul-
tural instruments into those that are “mute,”
such as the plough, “Semi-vocal,” as the ox,
and “vocal,” as the slave. The bondsman
was merely a “living tool.”” Even the union
of slaves as man and wife lacked sanctity and
stability. The children born were liable to
be sold to a distance, as in our own country
before the Civil War. On the other hand,
those home-born slaves were most usually, as
being the close associates of the master’s own
youngsters, a petted and pampered lot. The
money that a slave could scrape together was
his by courtesy rather than by any legal right.
The man who owned him body and soul could
deprive him of the savings of a lifetime for
any sort of guilt. Fortunately it was so de-
sirable to cultivate frugality and cheerful
obedience in a domestic by giving him some-
thing to live for that his small funds were
usually safe and might enable him eventually
to buy either freedom from his owner or a
17 There is a sad parallel to this in the life of the
guitti, the “dirty ones,” who live in the primitive huts
of the Campagna, as the reader will find it movingly
set forth in A. Cervesato, The Roman Campagna, trans-
lated by L. Caico and M. Dove, pp. 179 ff. Old Cato
would have made an effective caporale.
[36]
T H E H O U S E H O L D
slave of his own. The lot of this slave of a
slave proverbially resembled that of the work-
man of today who serves under a boss who
was once in the same condition.”
A slave's punishment for real or fancied
offenses might range from a simple lashing to
an ignominious death and a forgotten burial.
We find in use prototypes of the modern
“stocks,” in which the inability of the victim
even to move exposed him to the vilification
and tormenting of those who joy in badgering
so long as it be safe. A transfer from urban
service to the gruelling labor of a farm, a
grain-mill or a stone quarry was also a dreaded
threat. On big estates the field hands often
had to work in fetters, and only confinement
at night in semi-underground barracks could
insure their presence in the morning for fur-
ther fagging toil. The chance to make an
escape even in a crowded city with open
country about was poor. In an age that knew
no abolitionists, self-interest turned everybody’s
hands against the fugitive, and professional
slave-hunters had plenty of volunteers to help
them. With unconscious humor a runaway
18 As the Spanish proverb puts it: contra peon hecho
dama no para pieza en tabla.
[37]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
was said to have stolen himself. Recapture
resulted in branding on the forehead with F,
the initial letter of the Latin word for fugitive,
and in maltreatment more dreadful than death.
Nor was the revenge of murdering a master
so sweet as to be worth the risk of crucifixion,
the most agonizing of all executions, which
awaited his almost certain detection. Chron-
ically refractory slaves were sometimes sold
to gladiatorial schools where their brutality
could be curbed and made valuable.
The food and clothing apportioned a slave
would suffice to keep him efficient as a worker
but no more. While denied, of course, the
use of the dress of citizenship, slaves would
look in general like the very poor among the
free. History tells us of a bill in the senate
which proposed to put them all in uniform,
but it failed to pass, through fear that a
recognition of their numerical preponderance
would lead to dangerous uprising such as
several times nearly wrecked the state anyway.
There were, indeed, many masters who sub-
scribed to the statement that a man had as
many enemies as he had servitors.
It was only by stinting his appetite and
selling from his rations that the slave saved
[38]
T H E H O U S E H O L D
what he was allowed to regard as his own.
The self-indulgent were free to consume their
Scanty dole entirely and even to supplement
it by tid-bits bought with such money as they
received as presents or tips. For the origin
of the tipping system can be traced at least
as far back as the early Roman Empire, when
even access to the lord of a mansion might
be attainable only by judicious bribery of his
Servants, and other favors were equally pur-
chasable. The food of the slave was probably
no worse, at any rate, than that of the humble
free, but it could be in painful contrast with
the living which he had enjoyed before the
lottery of war deprived him of native land
and family, Snapping every Social, religious
and moral tie for a desperate forever.
Of course, both Stoic teaching and the
progress of Christianity gradually ameliorated
the condition of the slaves. In all periods,
masters were conferring freedom upon them,
changing them from “things ’’ to “persons”
as a reward for lengthy fidelity or for some
special act of merit. As a freedman, he re-
mained still in a state of semi-dependence upon
his former master, whose relationship to him
was now that of patron to client. They helped
[39]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
each other. The ex-slave might indeed con-
duct business enterprises for his former owner
with money which the latter furnished as
capital and enjoy a stipulated share in all
profits. Freedmen became immensely wealthy
as agents of men of Senatorial rank, who could
do no business that would take them out of
Italy, and as household officials of the em-
perors. The administrative ability of freed-
men, especially those of Greek stock, was a
great asset to the government; but their rise
to power in general was largely responsible
for a materialism that was in painful contrast
to the austere simplicity that had characterized
the Republic nearly to its close.
The system of slavery brought its own pun-
ishment upon its upholders. Habitual exer-
cise of arbitrary power and the self-indulgence
that was fostered by luxuriously minute serv-
ice led to that pride of despotism that is its
own undoing. Slavery was one of the factors
that brought the world’s greatest empire
tumbling to its fall.
[40]
IV. MATRIMONY
EFORE we start a Roman baby on the
career of manhood or womanhood, we
had better wed its parents. The
institution of matrimony enjoyed among the
early Romans at least as much respect as it
is now accorded in the United States, and no
people have ever regarded the rearing of chil-
dren as more essential to the civic and reli-
gious interests of their state. But even if the
oft-repeated statement were true that for five
hundred years after the founding of the city
there was no case of divorce, it would only
seem remarkable if we could be sure that it was
not rather the machinery for separation than
a cause for it that was lacking. This is the
vital point which it irks some reformers even
now to recognize. Moreover, a Roman union
was a marriage de convenance, so that, as in
Latin countries still, the bride and groom often
had to depend upon post-marital propinquity
to develop a love that may safely be assumed
to precede most American marriages.
[4I
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
We read of two methods of marrying, one
by which the bride came into the complete
power of her husband, “into his hand ” the
Latin phrase neatly puts it, and the other by
which she remained under her father’s con-
trol and retained any property of her own
and the right to inherit from him. This latter
method seems to have amounted to no more
than the consent of the parties, without cere-
mony, to live with each other as man and
wife, and it had become so popular by the
close of the Republic as to make almost ob-
solete the following three forms which once
enjoyed supreme importance though they sub-
jected the wife wholly to her husband.
The most elaborate of the three was a sac-
ramental ceremony, the confarreate wedding,
which was so called because the couple ate
together a cake of spelt (far), a sacred offer-
ing to Jupiter. Since presumably the god
was once thought to reside in the cake, this
was really a communion service as well as a
mystical initiation of the woman into the reli-
gious life of her husband’s family. As a matter
of fact, the confarreate wedding was as im-
pressive and binding as any that Sacerdotalism
[42 |
M A TRIM O N Y
has ever evolved. It was the exclusive privi-
lege and affliction of patricians.
Another method of marrying, plebeian in its
origin, was simpler, being effected by a ficti-
tious sale of the bride to the groom in the
presence of five witnesses and of a person
who held a pair of Scales, not as symbolizing
the justice that should control matrimonial re-
lations, but as a relic of the day when money
was not minted and had to be weighed.
Simpler still and apparently the earliest was
the third process of constituting wedlock which
demanded nothing but a year of uninterrupted
living together. Moreover, in this type of
union, the wife might conserve her wedlock
and yet continue under the same control as
before marrying by merely absenting herself
for a period of three nights in that annual
term. In other words, this might be regarded
as a sort of trial marriage to fix upon one's
choice of paterfamilias.
A betrothal ceremony was in no wise ob-
ligatory, but became more and more fashionable
under the Empire. We actually hear of mar-
riage-brokers, such as still do business in
Italian rural districts; but they could scarcely
[43]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
have been so effectively organized as European
matrimonial bureaus are now under the joint
patronage of Hymen and Plutus. Roman
marriage lacked such preliminary of lovemak-
ing and Courtship as is normal in America
(though still rare in much of Italy today),
because boys and girls had almost no chance
for intimate association except perhaps at
public festivals. The arrangements were made
by the fathers * or guardians of the couple,
who might at the time be of any age over
six. The future bridegroom was assured as
large a dowry as the shrewdness of his father
could exact, while there was a unilateral prom-
ise on the part of the girl that she would
marry him. His pledge to her might be of
iron, not in the metaphorical, but in the literal
sense; for fashion long sanctioned an iron
engagement ring that, so far as our literary
evidence goes, seems to have lacked even a
gem to embellish it. Professional jilts may
ponder this pretty practice along with the
humor of a certain Roman law that denied a
19 Even among the Italians in an American city it
may be a purely parental affair. The girl “often does
not even know whom she is to marry until the matter is
all settled; ” cf. Park and Miller, Old Traits Transplanted,
p. 156. Of course, the conditions in the old country are
well known.
[44]
M A TRIM O N Y
man who broke his engagement the recovery
of his espousal gifts. However, the maiden
did the best she could with her ring by wear-
ing it on the third finger of her left hand from
which it was believed a nerve ran straight to
her heart. In later folklore this link is called
not a sinew but the vena amoris. We hear of
yet another law that prescribes marriage
within two years, if the betrothal was to be
valid, but it is obvious that the age of the
betrothed must have been a factor in the
length of the engagement.
While legally a girl could marry at twelve
and a boy at fourteen, the girl usually waited
to at least the latter age and the youth to his
twenties. The disparity between their ages
often meant a certain initial schooling of the
girl by her mature husband as in similar
Italian marriages in our time. If, however,
a daughter had reached her latest teens with
no sign of a suitor, she might be reckoned
a little passée, and father and mother would
incline to increase the amount of her dowry
and let the new offering be known among pro-
spective eligibles, lest she be doomed to an
unlovely spinsterhood. Pagan Pliny’s bestowal
of marriage-portions on the poor Set a prec-
[45]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I R E
edent for philanthropy of the same sort in
the Christian Italy that we know. As a matter
of fact, unmarried women with records of long
expectancy have always been as rare in that
country as child-mothers are common, and
among the ancient Romans they seem to have
been as phenomenal as in all ages among the
Jews.
For the marriage the question of lucky and
unlucky days was quite as important as among
the meticulous of today. There is a well
known couplet:
Ne di Venerd, ne di Marte
Non si sposa e non si parte
which attests the ban that is put on Tuesday
and Friday. Again, the month of May is only
preserving its old disrepute, while June, which
is now in such high favor as “the month of
brides,” used to be in its first half just as bad
as May. It was April that most enjoyed the
grace of Venus. In all, a full third of the
three hundred and sixty-five days was for one
reason or another under the ban of Hymen.
Just as nowadays a profane Justice of
the Peace in a bare office can tie as tight a
matrimonial knot as an archbishop may with
[46]
MIA TRIM O N Y
all the hallowed glory of a cathedral wedding,
provided a certain minimum be done and
spoken, so in Rome, after parental accord had
been reached the only real essential was the
consent of bride and groom to their contract.
In the various forms of ceremony already de-
scribed this could be symbolized by the join-
ing of right hands in the presence of witnesses,
or by the escorting of the bride to her hus-
band’s home in procession, or by the actual
signing of a document, or by several of these
acts combined. The noteworthy fact is that
if the pair wished merely to be married, neither
state nor religious authorities had to play a
rôle, and the amount of fashionable embellish-
ment was left to the individual taste and purse.
On the day before her wedding the maiden
dedicated to deity her toys and her gown of
childhood, - luckily not a limousine and a
Worth frock! — Her bridal costume included
a white tunic of an old-fashioned weave, girt
with a woolen girdle which was tied with a
“true lover’s ” knot of Hercules, a trusted
protection against the magic of an envious
glance. Her shoes were saffron yellow, her
ample veil the color of flame. The latter was
SO characteristic of her trousseau that to
[47]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
“take the veil" in Latin meant for a woman
to make the vows not of celibacy but of matri-
mony. The closest parallel for the headgear
today is perhaps the flame-colored, gold-
fringed veil that a Greek bride wears. In
memory probably of an age when men con-
summated marriage by capturing their bride
at the point of the spear (the practice ulti-
mately responsible for the story of the rape
of the Sabines), the groom in more civilized
times used to divide the girl’s hair into six
tresses with the point of a spear-like imple-
ment. Above these, as arranged around her
head, she wore a garland of flowers which she
had plucked with her own hand. Her mate,
too, might wear a chaplet.
The opening scene of the ceremonies was
at the house of the bride's father, which would
be adorned with flowers and shrubbery, as
would also the home of the groom. Early on
the morning of the wedding day, a professional
diviner ascertained the omens. If there were
a marriage contract, the witnesses to the sign-
ing would be ten. In confarreate and co-
emption weddings the woman spoke an ancient
formula of words that (using typical names,
as we may say “John Doe") declared her
[48]
M A T R IM O N Y
Gaia where or when her husband was Gaius.
A matron friend of the bride next brought
the two together for the solemn clasping of
right hands. Prayer, sacrifices and wishes of
good luck were then in order, and a wedding
feast followed at which the guests received
their portions of a wedding cake, the ingre-
dients of which, anise, cumin, cheese, flour,
lard and must, would promise little to a mod-
ern appetite, no matter how skilful the cook-
ing may have been.
If the more ancient practices were followed,
this brought the celebration to the fall of
night. Then, just at the poetic hour when the
evening star was rising (in notable contrast
with the glare and hubbub of a modern high-
noon wedding), the torch-light procession
would form to escort the bride to her new
home. Again in simulation of that primitive
marriage by capture the girl was torn from her
mother’s arms with a feint of force.” Her
escort, to the music of pipe players would
include besides the guests the usual uninvited
multitude of the curious. As the parade pro-
ceeded, there were cries to the marriage god,
20 A show of violence is still the tradition in the
marriage rites of Albanian communities of Italy; cf. Cate-
rina Pigorini-Beri, In Calabria, 2nd. Ed., 1892, pp. 46–50.
[49]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I R E
much singing of coarse, Satiric Songs and a
scrambling for nuts which the groom was
expected to shower among the omnipresent
small boys. Originally, like the rice that is
thrown today, this fruit of a prolific tree sym-
bolized fertility. The youngsters might save
the nuts for use as marbles or stow them away
at once where they would alleviate the gastric
gnawings that boyhood never lacks.
The writer once saw a procession of a double
wedding wending its way between the high
walls of Anacapri's lanes, during which there
was scrambling for candy nuts and many a
sally from above, which sounded more profane
than sacred and heightened the shy terror of
at least the male half of the quartette. With
the largess of nuts we may compare the
dragées (boxes of candy-covered almonds)
used in polite Society in Italy for a wedding
and in France for a Christening.
A page used to walk on each side of the
bride, a third boy carried before her a torch
of white thorn as an avertive of evil. For
this there was a contest among the guests at
the end of the ceremonies. They also dis-
played in the parade the girl’s distaff and
spindle. Having arrived at the house, she
[5o J
M A T R IM O N Y
anointed the door-posts with oil as a symbol
of fat days to come and wound them with
woolen fillets as a token of her own household
occupations, unless perhaps these acts were
merely dedicatory rites to deity. She made
her first entrance by being lifted over the
threshold, either to guard against the ill omen
of a stumble or as a reminiscence of the days
when exogamy even at the cost of violence
was the marriage practice and the bride went
in kicking and struggling in her captor's arms.
Here too she may have repeated the formula
which originally may have meant that there-
after her husband's name was to be her name,
but which sounds like a declaration of part-
nership. He now brought her symbolic gifts
of fire and water, while she, on her part, if
early customs were observed, presented him
with a bronze coin, a first payment on her
dowry, and the household gods with another,
having already bestowed a third upon the
deities of the neighboring crossways; nor did
she omit a prayer for marital happiness be-
fore the marriage couch, set in the atrium,
At a second wedding banquet which closed
the following day, she made her first sacrifice
to the gods as a Roman matron. In fashion-
[51 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
able society the ensuing weeks would be full
of dinner parties in honor of the newly wed.
Human nature was not supernatural in
antiquity, and it cannot surprise us if mar-
riages contracted largely at the invitation of
others between those who were sometimes
from our point of view mere children, had to
be dissolved. Under the free forms that pre-
vailed by the close of the Republic, a mere
renouncement of the bond because of absence
of marital affection was all that was necessary
to legalize divorce, and there was some dis-
pute as to whether even re-marriage alone
would not do it. Notice would ordinarily be
served, but sometimes the husband merely
broke the marriage tablets, or taking the key
turned his spouse out of the house. On the
other hand, even the wife’s paterfamilias long
had the right to dissolve her union with her
husband. Ultimately the law required seven
witnesses for a repudiation document, and
theoretically it always vetoed groundless Sep-
arations and punished misconduct that justi-
fied a divorce.
However, as the Republic closed, dissolu-
tions of marriage seem to have almost kept
pace with the consummations. The family
[ 52
M A TRIM O N Y
life that was once Rome’s best asset was now
sadly demoralized. Legislation displayed more
than its usual degree of impotence to mend
the people's morals. Of course, the satirists
revelled in the opportunities that are still of
fered the scandal-mongers of our “yellow
press,” but we must exercise caution in ac-
cepting what they say as a fair statement of
the truth. Nor must we ignore in our judg-
ments the ancient point of view. Quite
respectable Romans reckoned concubinage
reputable and legitimate for the unmarried
man and, in general, the Sexual relations of a
man with an alien woman or with a slave were
of minimum concern to polite society and none
at all to the State, since their offspring did
not figure as a citizen. A divorce was not a
disgrace; it was merely the dissolution of a
contract, and the dowry system made it unnec-
essary for any woman to live with a man she
hated merely in order to live at all. The con-
tinued importance of the dot among the Latin
races will not surprise anybody who is ac-
quainted with its antecedents and with the way
in which the provision still works. In Italy,
at least, according to almost universal judg-
ment, the relations of husband, wife and chil-
[53]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
dren with one another are notably affectionate
and charming to observe.
In conjunction with this sketch of Roman
marriage we may most fittingly discuss briefly
the position of women.” In the stricter fam-
ilies of correct Society young daughters were
probably somewhat secluded from worldly
life, much as convent-bred girls of the Italian
aristocracy still are, but the woman of matur-
ity, although legally under the perpetual tute-
lage of some man, yet actually enjoyed through
her marriage more nearly the freedom of an
American than the matrons of any other
ancient people. As a person of dignity, prac-
tical wisdom, energy and decision of char-
acter, she deserved it. To what extent she
sometimes anticipated one American interpre-
tation of the equality of the sexes depends
upon the truthfulness of the well-known plaint
of Cato the Elder: “All men rule their wives,
we Romans rule all men, but our wives us.”
But he is credited also with that equally tell-
tale remark: “If there had been no women
in the world, the gods would still have been
21. The relatively inferior position of the sex in con-
temporary Italy has been often remarked by visitors
from our land, but there is a steady advance upward
within recent years.
[54]
M A TRIM O N Y
dwelling among us.” Probably they did in-
cline somewhat to harshness and to master-
fulness, true to George Eliot's reply to a
criticism of her sex: “God made them so to
match the men.”
In any case we must not judge the matron
of the best periods by sporadic exceptions to
decency, although these were becoming more
and more common as the Republic came to
its end. Family life originally was simple,
pure and well-disciplined. She whom we
think of as truly Roman was mistress of the
house and addressed as such by everybody in
it, whether free or slave. Nor was she like
a Greek lady confined to a woman's quar-
ters.” With her husband's knowledge she
was at liberty to walk abroad in the city, at-
tended by her own servants. Religious
services claimed her presence outside as well
as inside the house. The theater and public
games were open to her. Our “mothers’
meetings ’’ had their ancient prototype. A Ro-
man matron had even the dubious privileges
22 Of course, in such particulars the Hellenized south
of Italy must have been very different from the capital.
For various reasons Sicilian women are now narrowly
restricted in their lives. This is true of them even as
immigrants in the Italian quarters of American cities.
[ 55]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L IF E
of testifying like a man in a court of law and,
if a person of rank, of receiving like him a
funeral eulogy when no longer able to profit by
either praise or blame. In the home her vir-
tue was that of the Biblical woman who
“seeketh wool and flax and worketh willingly
with her hands. She layeth her hands to the
spindle and her hands hold the distaff.”
To know just what sort of loom she used for
weaving, the curious need only peer into any
one of several doorways in any mountain vil-
lage of Italy and see it unchanged and so ap-
preciate at least one of her virtues, patience,
the one which now tops the list in Italy. On
the other hand, such work as washing and
cooking was denied her, no matter how much
she might yearn for housewifely distinction
in it. These were the menial tasks of slavery
and of the helpless poor. Supervision was
her chief duty, although, as we shall see, she
might devote personal care and instruction
to her children. The sight of a mother with
her baby in her arms was a special delight
to the Italian eye long before the first Ma-
donna and Bambino were painted.
Among the Romans a wife received visits
from relatives. Her husband’s friends were
[56 |
M A T R IM O N Y
hers, and, unlike her Greek sisters, she was
conceded a place among the guests at table.
With him she went to dinner parties. To be
sure, in the “good old days' wine was not
her portion, and we hear of a gracious pro-
vision that male relatives might kiss a woman
to make sure that the strength of her breath
was due rather to a favorite vegetable than
to the fruit of the vine. However, all the
other pleasures of mixed society were open
to her. She even had her special festival on
the first of March, when, just as on her birth-
day, members of the household and her friends
brought her gifts and good wishes. At all
times her husband would seek her counsel on
family affairs. All this, if he were a good
husband and she a good wife, and it is only
with such, of course, that we care to deal here.
Under the free form of marriage that widely
obtained under the Empire she often had the
disposal of so much wealth of her own as gave
her great power. No woman in any age could
be courted more than some of these imperial
dames. The reader must find his detailed ac-
count of all this elsewhere, a masculine pic-
ture, of course, of female frailty. Therein he
will learn how with increasing legal emanci-
[ 57]
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
pation, even sumptuary laws could not curb
woman’s passion for jewelry and rich raiment
(the Italian propensity far figura is no new
phenomenon); ** how, neglecting the ancestral
faith, she ran more and more after strange
gods, not to speak of astrologers and fortune
tellers (who never seem to be misogynists in
any age!); how she meddled with man's pre-
rogative of politics, and often as an intriguer;
how she dared to acquire accomplishments,
dancing more gracefully than was seemly for
a reputable woman, aye even lapsed into art
and literature and the seamy side of theatrical
life, and began to regard marriage as only an
inevitable preliminary to divorce. But these
were largely women of the capital, women of
the fast set, the sort who still figure in such
newspapers and society sheets as print all the
news that isn’t fit to print, and it is only a
person who believes in the time-honored (or
-disgraced) double standard of morals for the
sexes who will not readily admit that sexually
at least men were in all periods the worse half
** Travellers often comment on the Italian practice of
“keeping up appearances at any cost.” There is a cer-
tain love of show in both sexes that accounts for much
that is pleasing to the eye of an observer and is a
challenge to his sense of humor.
[58]
MIA TRIM O N Y
of Roman society. The familiar sepulchral
abbreviation S. V. Q. (sine ulla querela) im-
plying a married life passed without quarreling
was probably no oftener a lie than some of
our own tombstone advertisements of virtue.
[59]
V. BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD

NE of the most serious decisions that
the paterfamilias had to make was
at the birth of a son or daughter.
The infant was laid at his feet “ and if he
wished to acknowledge it as his and provide
for its uprearing, he raised it in his arms. If
he refused, a servant would expose it in some
public place “” to die, or, if such were its luck,
to be found by some wayfarer, who might
cherish it as a child of his own or, should such
be his will, bring it up to a life of slavery,
professional mendicancy or vice. Such ex-
posure of infants to die, while common enough
in Greece in the Hellenistic period, seems to
have been rarely, if ever, practised by the
Romans until the first century of our era in
24 The original reason why a newborn child was laid
upon the earth, as he still is in some parts of Italy
(Amalfi, the Abruzzi and Sicily), is forever disputable.
25 The shelf at the door of the Ospedale di San
Spirito in Rome for the deposit of undesired babies
perpetuates, it would seem, an ancient opportunity of a
similar sort offered by the columna lactaria, Paulus-Festus,
Ed. of Lindsay, p. IoS, 13. There used to be a similar
arrangement at the Casa dei Trovatelli in Naples.
[60 |
B I R T H A N D C H I L D H O O D
the case of a healthy child. On the other
hand, an incurable cripple or an imbecile was
drowned at once in accordance with convic-
tions that would actuate some of our own
physicians to do the same, did law and public
opinion still permit. Even the mutilation *
of foundlings (such as we read about in Vic-
tor Hugo’s L’Homme Qui Rit) to increase
their value as beggars with a compassionate
public has ancient parallels. A female infant
was less welcome than a male, even as now
in poverty-stricken parts of Sicily the birth
of a girl may be made known by a sign of
mourning on the door. An ancient dream-
book suggests one reason, in setting forth that
to dream of a daughter is worse than to dream
of a son since she implies a dowry and is a
sort of creditor. In general, however, babies of
either sex would be spared, reared and loved
as Nature intended them to be. The wreath
on the door where a birth had occurred
stood for real joy as often surely as crape
betokens sincere sorrow in a home of bereave-
ment today. The purposed childlessness of
some of the city rich under the early Empire
26 Marquardt, Das Privatleben der Römer, I, p. 83,
ascribes the practice to modern Italy.
[61 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
for the sake of the attentions of legacy
hunters was an anomalous phenomenon in
striking contrast to the philo-progenitiveness
— no smaller word could express it — that
is so noticeable in Italy today. Even in cases
where the newcomer was exposed, maternal
love might insure its ultimate prosperity by
putting with it some trinket or piece of jew-
elry which would later lead to its identifica-
tion *" and restoration perhaps to a respectable
position. So at any rate the plots of Graeco-
Roman comedies would lead us to believe.
Doting, ever fondling, indulgent parents
are the rule in present-day Italy. They can
spoil children with as much skill as any Amer-
ican can and are no strangers to the nursery
maxim: “If at first you don’t succeed, cry,
cry again.” Their Roman ancestors, on the
contrary, at least started with a stern parental
discipline. This was tempered, to be sure,
by a solicitude about the safety of the baby
that among our contemporaries must find its
27 This might prevent in the nick of time the con-
summation of an incestuous marriage, as both pagan and
Christian writers recognized. In recent times, mothers,
resorting to the “ ruota " of an Italian hospital for
foundlings, have sometimes suspended from the baby’s neck
a token of identity known only to themselves, cf. R. Klein-
paul, Römische Lebens- und Landschaftsbilder, pp. 150 fſ.
[62 |
B I R T H A N D C H I L D H O O D
parallel only in homes of uncommon worry.
Thus we learn that almost every conceivable
activity of the child, nursing, crying, learning
to Stand, walk and talk, was under the tute-
lage of a separate deity whose good will had
to be propitiated.
On the ninth day of life a boy received
his praenomen at a special ceremony. For
some reason or other which feminists may
conjecture, only eight days were necessary to
conclude the naming of a girl.” In each case
the day was celebrated with a sacrifice, the
burning of incense, and a lustration with
water that at least suggests our rite of bap-
tism. There was a general jollification among
friends and relatives who came to congratulate
the parents and to join the household in pre-
senting the baby with its first gifts.
Birth, marriage and death were the three
points in the career of man when superstitious
fears reached their acme; for at these times
evil spirits have ever been deemed to reach
their maximum of maleficent industry. Ac-
28 In modern Rome the baptism of a girl baby is
of less importance than that of a boy, according to
W. W. Story, Roba di Roma, 6th. Ed., I, p. 486. For the
eight-day period observed in Venice see W. D. Howells,
Venetian Life, 2nd. Ed., p. 32 I.
[63 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
cordingly, the father early hung round his
child’s neck a capsule, the prototype of our
lockets, containing an amulet that protected
his helplessness against the evil eye and all
forms of sorcery. The bulla, as it was called,
came in the first instance from Etruria, and
its material long betokened the social status
of the wearer, but eventually every free-born
baby displayed one of gold. The girl dis-
carded hers on the eve of her wedding; the
boy when he donned the toga of manhood for
the first time. This corresponded in a way
to the time when American youngsters bash-
fully assume the dignity of long trousers. The
wearing of the bulla, with an amulet or some
magic formula inside and sometimes inscribed
with its owner’s name, reminds one of the
use of similar objects throughout Italy and,
of course, in many parts of the world today.
In particular the Italians of the south suspend
by a string from the neck a small leather or
cloth scapular containing a representation of
the Madonna or of a saint or merely the name
of such a heavenly warder. It goes by the
name of abitino or devozione and works just
as well as any phylactery of the ancients.
To the honor of Rome in its prime be it
[64 |
B I R T H A N D C H I L D H O O D
said that children, as a rule, were nursed by
their own mothers except in cases where the
use of a wet-nurse was unavoidable. Indeed,
Roman matrons in general gave their boys
and girls their personal attention, although
naturally they had the assistance of compe-
tent slaves who would perform the actual bath-
ing and dressing. When we read of a
preliminary chewing of baby’s food by the
nurse, and of an infantile diet of honey and
butter,” we are somewhat fortified against the
shocks of seeing what a contadina can do to
her baby’s stomach now without causing its
immediate death. Among the peasants an in-
fant that has never tasted wine, coffee or raw
sausage has been indeed neglected.
Greek and Roman philosophers comment
upon man’s ill-omened cry at birth and his
inability to laugh until the fortieth day there-
after; but in general infancy and childhood
had none of the importance that they now
have in literature and biography, so that
scant information is available for our sketch.
Such pictures as, for instance, that which
Catullus gives us of an infant Torquatus or
29 Upon its modern use consult A. De Gubernatis,
Storia Comparata degli Usi Natalizi in Italia e presso
gli Altri Popoli Indo-Europei, pp. 131 ff.
[65
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
another of less celebrity in Statius’ Silvae have
to be supplemented by the loveliness of certain
representations in Sculpture, e.g., the children
of the Ara Pacis reliefs. We know, however,
that the baby had his lullabys to put him to
sleep in a rocking cradle, his rhymes and sto-
ries to keep him happy while awake, and, as he
grew older, threats of ogres to make him obe-
dient. The bugaboo Lamia was quite as terri-
fying as La Befana can be now — she is not
altogether a female Santa Claus — and the
were-wolf of Petronius' day is the lupo man-
naro of Italian folklore and superstition. The
child went out to ride in a diminutive litter.
To start him right in his one foreign language,
a Greek was assigned very early to care for
him, so that the boy of position was likely
to grow up a bilinguist.
While the sudden transplanting of a mod-
ern man or woman into a social gathering of
ancients, even without the barrier of language,
or vice versa that of a Roman into one of
our own would result in a certain amount of
awkward embarrassment for all concerned,
the introduction of their young children would
create no such situation. Five year old
Gaius would soon feel at home with his mod-
[66 ||
B IF T H A N D C H II, D H O O D
ern mates, not only because children lack
many of the social inhibitions of their elders
but because so many of the simpler play-
things “ would be the same that you can find
in any of the toy-booths erected for Saint
Joseph's Day or for Befana’s purchases for
the Eve of Epiphany. One of the first that
a Roman baby played with was a string of
various tiny figures made into a necklace
serviceable in teething. Representations of
axes, Swords, crescents, Scissors, harpoons, etc.,
not only amused their possessor by their
rattling but some of them also served as pro-
phylactics against the witchcraft of the envi-
ous or hostile.
But girl babies soon graduated from these
baubles to the Superior joys of dolls (often
articulated, though never alas! like modern
creations articulate) and of the miniature
equipment of doll life that we still find in the
nursery. The mention of mice harnessed to
a toy cart would suggest, however, a different
species of nursery maid from that which may
nowadays mismanage children. The pair of
30 The evidence is strong that Rome was as indebted
to Greece for its implements of play as the United States
was to Germany until the Great War brought even Santa
Claus under suspicion of pro-Germanism.
[ 67 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
wheels pushed by a long handle that Italian
youngsters still use is pictured in ancient mon-
uments repeatedly, and they knew the joy of
driving a team of goats — and no doubt furi-
ously “like the driving of Jehu, the son of
Nimshi’’; for mercifulness has never been a
birthright in the southlands of Europe. Their
tops were spun in the normal European way
of today by lashing with a whip and not by
the mere pulling of a string. Hoops, on the
other hand, were bowled along as in our
streets, but a jingle of metal attachments
Served as the warning to get out of its way
which American children prefer to shout — a
degeneracy in manners shall we say! See-
saw was an amusement common to both the
Greeks and Romans. Pompeian wall-paint-
ings also prove the use of stilts. While no
game with bat or racket was played, children
put a ball to most other possible uses from
feminine tosses of the soft, colored variety
to the vigorous batting of handballs against a
wall, and their elders at any rate practised
a bowling game that anticipated the play at
boccia which now amuses all ages.
A Surprising number of group games that
[68 ||
B I R T H A N D C H II, D H O O D
still entertain youth originated in a forgotten
past. Roman children were already enjoying
Hide and Seek, Blind Man's Buff, Playing
Soldiers, Odd and Even. In tossing pennies
they had to shout “heads or ships' instead
of “heads or tails,” because such were figured
on the obverse and reverse of their Repub-
lican bronze coins. Girls played with astra-
gals as jackstones. These were the pastern
bones of cloven-footed animals, such as sheep
and goats, and are a common plaything
around the Mediterranean still. For marbles
they used and continue to use round pebbles
or nuts, almonds in August, but, better still,
hazel nuts at Christmas. An Italian game
that a Roman boy could join without instruc-
tion consists in pyramiding four nuts to make
a castle which is to be demolished by the
casting of a fifth. Even board-games like
chess, checkers and backgammon have ancient
precursors that were highly popular, as wall-
paintings and terra-cotta figures along with
allusions in literature attest.
Somewhere between fourteen and seventeen,
as a rule, boys exchanged their robe of boy-
hood at a special Social and religious function
[69 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
which congratulating friends and relatives
would attend. It was a glad day for the
youth, who now dispensed with the supervis-
ion of his paedagogus, his inseparable shadow,
and went his own ways. It was a proud day
for the father, whose visit to the Forum with
a son now able to share in all the activities
of Roman citizenship meant a shower of felic-
itations from all his business or professional
acquaintances. But before we take the fledg-
ling any further in his flight, we must consider
briefly how he had been educated.
Roman education is honored as it deserves
in this series with a special treatise, so that
we need not deal in detail with either its
form or its spirit. Until the time of the Em-
pire, the government left the moral and in-
tellectual training of future citizens wholly to
their parents and to private schooling. To
this day in Italy, there is no such state con-
trol as there is with us. Education was with-
out any standardization, neglected the masses,
and fortified the natural conservatism of the
privileged few who enjoyed it. Practical wis-
dom was the goal; for the Romans were
nothing if they were not utilitarian to the last
degree. Civic usefulness, intense patriotism,
| 70 |
B I R T H A N D C H II, D H O O D
ready obedience to authority,” willingness to
work with others, respect for ancestral tradi-
tion, scrupulous observance of religious rites,
these were the lessons emphasized in home
and school. Until the Romans became strongly
Hellenized, discipline rather than culture was
the aim, and dutifulness (pietas) in all re-
lationships of life might be termed the pin-
nacle of their house of virtues. Parents then
recognized how much more personal example
counted than any delegated teaching or book-
ish precept. Accordingly, the old-fashioned
father would himself instruct his boys in the
physical training and manly sports that he
believed produced not only a skilled soldier
but a good citizen. The Roman attitude
towards athletics deserves indeed some special
notice.
While Rome did not continue for us the noble
example that Greece set in her prime by pur-
suing sport for Sport's Sake and shunning the
spirit of professionalism, yet she did transmit
some of the Hellenic appreciation of physical
training as a preservative of health. It was
31 The attitude of the Italian masses today towards
rules and regulations cannot be accounted one of the
survivals from Roman times. Prohibitive placards merely
give an extra zest to the pleasures of indulgence.
[71 ||
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L IF E
a Roman who said mens sana in corpore sano.
Moreover, they realized, as Americans only
recently have begun to do, that exercise can-
not wisely be confined to youth alone. Rome's
greatest statesmen enjoyed games of ball with
the same propriety that ours may now play
golf on the last six days of the week, although
they sometimes had their thoughts, I fear,
much more upon the bodily advantage to be
derived from it than upon any fun. In fact,
our great group-contests of baseball, football,
lacrosse and cricket lacked an ancient
counterpart,” and Rome had no such thing
as a national game. In the time of her spread-
ing conquests, interest turned rather to that
individual efficiency that militarism demands.
A youth must run and jump, and learn to
swim and ride and wrestle and fence, because
only so could he hope to overcome his foe, or,
if need be, live to fight another day by mak-
ing a speedy escape. At the Capital, the
Campus Martius, a great level stretch in a
fold of the river Tiber, drew throngs of men
and boys for a swim, the foot race, the long
32 The only possible exception known to the writer,
the contests of the orgaupets at Sparta, is by no means
3. SUITe OI) e.
[72 |
B I R T H A N D C H I L D H O O D
or high jump, boxing, wrestling, throwing the
discus or javelin, or some variety of ball play-
ing. But no Roman maid or matron had the
Spartan privilege of competitive sports in such
a place. Indeed, the mere sight of a game of
basket ball between teams of girls would have
struck Cicero as a portent to be expiated by
the sacrifice of a black sheep. Still even now
the health of an Italian girl cannot be attrib-
uted to any such life of sport as is the joy of
her sex in Anglo-Saxon communities. On the
other hand, within recent years her brothers
have certainly taken up athletics with an al-
most American ardor, although, curiously
enough, independently of their school life.
A Roman wife instructed both her sons and
daughters in the preliminaries to school learn-
ing. Since most of the clothing even in the
noblest families was likely to be home-made
— Augustus dared to wear in public the cre-
ations of three generations of his women folk
— girls were taught to weave, spin and sew,
and no higher tribute could be paid at death
to a matron than that she stayed by the house
and attended to her wool. This remains the
prevalent view of woman's place in most of
, [73]
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
Southern Europe, where the extra-mural activ-
ities and superactivities of the Sex in America
are regarded as unseemly, if not unfeminine.
Eppur si muove!
The daughter in a Roman house might have
the prototype of a Spanish duenna as her es-
cort and governess, but sometimes the slave
was a male and not necessarily superannuated.
She had to be equipped to act as mistress of
a husband's home and household long before
the normal age for matrimony in the United
States, and it was fortunate for those whose
social rank did not limit them to private tutors
at home, as so many girls in Italy are now
restricted, that they secured at least a slight
insight into masculine ways through co-edu-
cation in the primary School. As a matter
of fact, such was the disparity common be-
tween the ages of wife and husband that the
latter often began his married life as a sort
of father and School teacher as well as spouse
to his mate.
As for the Roman boy, if his special guard-
ian slave, the paedagogus, had been carefully
chosen, he would learn much from him to the
betterment of mind, manners and morals, but
it would be from personal observation and
[74]
B I R T H A N D C H II, D H O O D
imitation * of his father that he would derive
his knowledge of a business or profession.
Thus, he listened as his parent advised a
client, delivered a speech, or scintillated in
prandial repartee; he watched him and often
served him as his acolyte as he performed a
sacrifice. For a period, too, sons enjoyed the
privilege of attending meetings of the senate
with their fathers; but this had to be stopped,
we are told, because mothers tried to make
their boys divulge the secrets of the sessions
— one of the few ancient records of that curi-
osity which is now so noticeable to the for-
eigner in the Italian of both sexes.
The discipline of the schools was harsh; *
the noise unendurable for neighbors, the prizes
of a rare or pretty book or the like rarely
conferred, the punishments more memorable
than their lessons in the “three R's,” the pay
of the teacher generally so low as to be an
acceptable model for retrograde communities
in all subsequent history.
83 It is from Italy that we have imported a revival of
this apprentice type of education in the Montessori method.
34. The Roman school boy had reason to believe that
Prometheus stole fire from heaven in the hollow of a
cane, if caught putting oil in his eyes to incapacitate
them for study or chewing cumin to induce the pallor
of illness.
[75]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
After the elementary schools those of
grammar and of rhetoric acquainted the pupil
with the literary culture both of Greece and
of the fatherland. Homer, Cicero, Virgil and
Horace were already text books eighteen cen-
turies and more ago. Thus he reached the
mental maturity when he might be sent
abroad for what corresponds somewhat to our
college education. In Greece Romans of the
upper class amended their relative racial
boorishness by contact with a people that,
however much it had deteriorated, was yet su-
perior to the Latin in taste and learning.
Athens was a university town. There phi-
losophy and rhetoric might be studied under
the most famous professors, but there were
besides other important centers of learning
further away, such as Alexandria, Rhodes and
the great cities of Asia Minor, where Roman
youths could broaden their minds by contact
with strange peoples and by the contempla-
tion of masterpieces of art. Incidentally they
gained a final polish for their Greek, which
with their own tongue constituted the world
languages of antiquity.
The young aristocrat who aspired to be a
statesman and possessed political influence
[76]
B I R T H A N D C H I L D H O O D
often went abroad on the staff of Some pro-
vincial governor, thereby acquiring, along with
a certain amount of tainted money, if he had
luck and few scruples, an experience of the
world that served him in good stead when
he himself became an administrator.
While farming and stock raising occupied
most of the Romans during the early history
of their country and they never ceased to be
proper vocations for even the most patrician,
during the closing years of the Republic it
was rather the army or public oratory and the
bar * that would claim a high-born youth when
he reached the age of manhood. If he chose
the former which was less likely under the
Empire, some general would take him under
his personal charge and training, if the latter,
some distinguished advocate and jurist. The
money-making of knight and senator (the
latter largely through agents, since he was not
supposed to do any business personally) in
a city where Mammon ought to have been
officially recognized as almost a super-god
among her deities, does not belong to our
descriptions here. A boy of the middle or
35 Class feelings, or, if you will, prejudices largely
account for the existence, and too often the bare exist-
ence of a superfluity of lawyers in Italy today.
[77]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
lower classes passed, of course, from school
into the business of life with no social stir;
but him we must ignore as any old Roman
patrician would have done, though for other
Iéa,SOInS.
Before we drop our review of the members
of a Roman household we must not forget
their pets. The evidence of both literature
and the monuments would lead us to believe
that the ancients lived in domestic intimacy
with their animals. Even Italians who are
much above the lowest classes still do. One
need not resort to an inn in some remote and
primitive village, if he would have pigeons
flutter down to the table where he eats, hens
roost on the foot-board of his bed, and dogs
and cats brush against his legs in the rôle of
lover or of mendicant, no matter where he
sits. If the tavern cat has lost the tip of its
tail, refer it not to accident but to a wide-
spread superstition that all the evil of the
animal being localized in its end, this should
be bitten off as early as possible. Still this
hypothetical evil did not appear in ancient
Rome until the imperial age, when Egypt be-
gan to export there some of her tame cats.
Previously the weasel had to play her part
[78 )
B I R T H A N D C H I L D H O O D
as mice-exterminator, but surely less agree-
ably. Romans kept other creatures domesti-
cated that we locate more comfortably for
ourselves in a Zoo. The Snake was a pro-
tected animal in the home, not merely as an
enemy of rodents * but because, if a male,
it incarnated the Genius of the master and,
if a female, the Juno of the mistress, so that
the destruction of one might lead to the death
of the corresponding human being. This ac-
counts for the story told of Tiberius Gracchus
that when he found two snakes in his bed and
was bidden by the diviners to kill one, he
chose the male that he might perish first (as
he soon did), rather than his young wife,
Cornelia, whom he dearly loved. Monkeys
had much in the columnar home to provide
them with the exercises of their native haunts,
but their escape to neighboring roofs through
the rain-hole was a nuisance.
Birds “ were the favorite pets, ranging in
size from the diminutive sparrow — anciently a
86 In the Philippine Islands women visitors have to
divide their antipathies between the mice and the large
Snake who is domesticated to eat the mice. Similarly
in Brazil a small boa constrictor, the gibola, has to take
the place of the cat.
37 Before the days of firearms Italy must have been
a vast aviary. Now that Nimrods patrol every rod of
[79 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
bird of love and not a pest *— through doves
and quails to ducks and geese. The almost
universal Suspension of a bird cage at the
front door in many parts of Italy is, therefore,
quite in accord with ancient practice. Talk-
ing birds were particularly popular and the
“good morning ” that greeted you at a door
did not of necessity come from human lips.
The pugnacity of quails and cocks accounted
for their popularity with sporting youth.
the land, a bird who exchanges a subdued twitter for a
real song is dead. -
38 Ornithologists query the use of the term “sparrow ’’
for passer. Lesbia’s pet was possibly. as Samuel Butler
(Alps and Sanctuaries, pp. 230–231) believed, the passero
solitario, a peerless singer: surely we must not think of
her deliciae in terms of the “English sparrow,” our urban
Scavenger.
[80 |
VI. CLOTHING

UR consideration of the inhabitants
of a Roman house brings us next
to an account of the clothes they
wore. While detailed description is quite im-
possible here, certain generalities are in place.
As one might presuppose among the descend-
ants of a pastoral people, the universal ma-
terial for their apparel was wool, until exposure
to foreign seductions towards the beginning
of the Empire gradually brought other stuffs
into vogue. Italians still appreciate the wis-
dom of wearing wool even in the heat of
summer, and the theory that the degeneracy
of Rome was partially due to her desertion
of that material would find more favor with
contadini than with some of our closet-schol-
ars. In any case, a certain debasement in
morality can be associated with the advent
from Oriental sources (verily ex Oriente lux!)
of thin or transparent tissues * of silk, linen
89 “Woven wind ’’ was a Roman's apt characteriza-
tion of such disclosive clothing. Women who have pur-
chased at Taranto scarfs made from the silky beard of
[81 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
and cotton, which Roman women came to love
and even the law could not prevent men from
wearing. Yet as late as the fourth century
of our era raiment entirely of silk was es-
teemed a mad extravagance. Times have
changed!
In general, however, the clothes of both
sexes, when compared with the products of
modern Sartorial genius, seem very simple,
and changes in style were then slower and
slighter. The full tyranny of tailor and dress-
maker had yet to be established with its ter-
rific consumption of time and money. The
hairdresser alone appears to have had that
domination over both sexes that the despotism
of Dame Fashion nowadays creates.
Under the Republic white and certain
sombre tinges of the natural wool were the
only colors in general use. Uniforms, how-
ever, had already been invented, and for the
distinctions that such costumes required they
used an expensive dye made from purple
shell-fish. This seems to have had a color-
Scale ranging from a deep orange to an almost
the lama-pesce, the shell-fish known to science as the pinna
nobilis, may be interested to know that the diaphanous
garments of ancient dancing-girls were woven from this
same product.
[82 |
C L O T H IN G
black purple and to have left an odor that
might well be said to make the wearer of
the garment “smell of money,” as the vulgar
put it. Our theatrical costumers could reduce
their anachronisms somewhat by striping
Roman Senatorial robes with crimson rather
than with royal purple. The imperial age
brought women and to a lesser degree
men a chance for that riot of color that we
now expect to see among Mediterranean
peoples. They began, indeed, to have the
more delicate half-shades along with the pure
tints.
So far as the cut of their clothing is con-
cerned, the sexes used to dress much more
alike than at the present time. Hailing a
person at a distance had in fact the same
uncertainties which it did recently for a brief
but anxious spell when women blossomed into
bloomer costumes, and as it may again, if,
as seems likely, knickerbockers complete their
capture of the feminine fancy.
The constriction of hats, corsets, belts,
garters, stockings, boots and gloves to which
we submit would excite the compassion and
often the risibility of an ancient, and in his
judgment might account for the Scant inspira-
[83]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
tion now available for the development of a
Praxiteles or a Polyclitus. The outdoor life
of the modern Italian and his consequent abil-
ity to endure extremes of heat and cold is a
fine tradition from his forefathers. The scant
apparel of the poor even in the winter months
excites among foreign observers a commisera-
tion which may be more fittingly bestowed
upon other conditions. It is a matter of rec-
ord that Italians in ordinary clothing have
withstood the rigors of Arctic cold better than
Scandinavians in heavy furs.
One of the many mythological stories that
charm by their naïve wickedness sets forth
that when Cronus thought to devour his own
son Zeus, Rhea thwarted his cannibalism by
presenting him with a stone, which he swal-
lowed without knowing the difference. Now
it is somewhat difficult to understand how
even the simplicity of a Greek deity could
have been fooled by such a substitution until
one has actually noted with his own eyes the re-
semblance to an elongated pill or capsule which
a baby in Greece or Italy often bears by the
time he has been swaddled in a band Some
five inches wide and many yards in length.
[84 |
C L O T H IN G
The wrapping * may confine both arms and
legs closely, so that the resulting bundle seems
to be enough like a stone to be stood on end,
either end, without fear of breakage, no mat-
ter how fragile the infant. As if this were
not enough to fortify the baby against all
dangers, nurses put inside the folds a bit of
garlic * which might be deemed strong enough
to repel even vampirical spirits. Italian in-
fants, too young to Say for themselves the
avertive “fora-fascino " or “benedica,” must
even now wear Some prophylactic against the
evil eye.
By the time ancient children had escaped
these swaddling clothes, they might pass into
that perfect freedom of nakedness that is not
rare during the summer in the more tropical
40 Hawthorne thought that the custom might be re-
sponsible for an excess of dwarfs, and Charles Dickens
for a superabundance of cripples, while W. W. Story, a
much better informed observer, has a good word for
the practice.
41 It symbolizes health and strength today in both
Greece and Italy. Peasants value it especially as a
prophylactic against cholera. Pitré includes a testa d'ag-
ghia in his picture of Sicilian amulets, Catalogo Illustrato
della Mostra Etnografica Siciliana (1892), p. 77, No. 217.
Compare p. 78, No. 218, for other safeguards against magic
worn by contemporary babies.
[85 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
sections of Italy today. At most, their frolics
would be hampered by an abbreviated tunic.
Only boys and girls of well-to-do families had
to suffer over their shirt on all dressy occa-
sions a “purple '' bordere gown, the so-called
toga praetexta, a miniature of the robe that
distinguished the higher magistrates. We
have, therefore, in this a chance anticipation
of the similarity of the short trousers that
schoolboys wear to the court dress of England.
The Roman girl laid aside this robe at mar-
riage, the boy upon coming of age, replacing
it by the garments of maturity, which we must
now describe.
During the cold of winter a Roman who
was neither an invalid nor an effeminate would
wear at most one or two woolen tunics between
his linen loin cloth and his toga or outer gar-
ment, while in summer out of doors he might,
if comfort contended with convention, dispense
with his shirts altogether. In the house, if
heat led him to discard his toga, he would, of
course, still wear a tunic. This was provided
with a girdle and reached just below the knee.
The toga was a white woolen robe, once scanty
but finally voluminous. It was the outward
badge of Roman citizenship, as significant,
[86 |
C L. O. T H IN G
indeed, as the possession of the pig-tail used
to be in China. It had to be worn at all
Social functions, as well as for all official busi-
ness, even under the early Empire when un-
conventional people began to substitute for
it, whenever they could or dared, the less
cumbersome cloak or mantle form of outer
garment, or even (like the tradespeople at
all periods) wear nothing at all over the tunic.
No national costume now is so jealously
guarded and so distinctive as the toga used to
be. Charon could identify at sight a citizen
of the greatest of all empires, no matter where
he died; for, if a genuine Roman, he came
to the Styx in that same garment as his shroud.
The dignity of the toga accorded indeed with
the proud assertion Civis Romanus sum, and
it long protected its wearer quite as the Union
Jack an Englishman though he were at the
very ends of the earth. Should we wonder
that some of our earlier sculptors,” when
commissioned to portray an American states-
man, in their despair of making him look great
in coat, waistcoat and trousers, often resorted
to a brazen anachronism, and put him into
42 Nathaniel Hawthorne tells us how the sculptor
Hiram Powers worried about representing Washington in
breeches.
[87 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
what seemed to their untutored minds to be
a toga?
As a matter of fact, the shape of this RO-
man garment changed greatly from the earliest
historical times, when it was worn in war as
well as in peace, by women as well as by
men, and perhaps as a mantle fastened by a
brooch, to the classical period, when it was
a robe symbolic of peace and among women
was worn only by the harlot. Its precise cut
and arrangement still cause the experts to
wrangle in the presence of the ancient statues,
although in general we know how it was put
OIl.
Those who wonder how the wearer could
have managed his hands and arms need only
observe the graceful Italian officers in the
ample military capes which they don in winter.
The truth is, the Roman gentleman had to
know how to wear it and needed his valet's
skill to lay the folds and creases aright. The
style, cut and set of his toga would indeed
differentiate the upstart vulgarian from a man
of birth and breeding quite as mercilessly as
Some modern Sartorial tests.
In contrast with the effeminacy of loose and
Somewhat flowing robes, trousers seem to us
[88 )
C L O T H IN G
Occidentals a thoroughly civilized and manly
garb, but the classic peoples held a contrary
opinion. The Greeks deemed them fit for
only the barbarians “ to wear, and, although
Roman Soldiers did resort to their comfort
and convenience during winter campaigns
abroad, it was long before polite society in the
capital would condescend to put them on; but
ultimately we find an emperor, Alexander
Severus, wearing white ones, superseding an
earlier style which had required scarlet, and
we can only guess whether imitative courtiers
followed suit. Stockings “ also and any sort
of gloves or neckwear were at Rome the priv-
ilege of age or invalidism rather than of man-
hood in its prime. Even long sleeves on a
tunic were accounted effeminate.
Of the other garments that more and more
displaced the toga for ordinary undress occa-
sions, the cloaks, mantles, and ponchos with
their hoods, space forbids an account. The
peasants and shepherds would wear goat Skins
43 If we may trust the ancient monuments, the type
still worn in Persia and among the Cossacks perpetuates
the fashions prevalent there two thousand years ago.
44. Shepherds and huntsmen, however, might wear the
leggings or puttees which the experience of modern war-
fare has made So popular.
[89 J
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I R E
and sheep skins, even as they still do. One
has to see some of the shepherds in wild and
remote districts to understand what “a wolf
in sheep's clothing ” really means. Even
hats * in the period with which we are dealing
were used by gentlemen ordinarily only on a
journey or sometimes in a wide-brimmed style
in the open theater. Laborers, however, wore
them, and if their use had been general among
all classes, we might have missed some of the
countless references to eye troubles which
seem to have been almost an endemic ailment.
The rules of religion prescribed that a per-
son sacrificing should have his head covered.
Accordingly we find the toga represented as
pulled up over the crown, much as Italian
women raise their shawls upon entering a
church or, in the lack of one, place a hand-
kerchief on their hair. The way in which
both sexes used to protect themselves against
a cold wind or sudden downpour is nowadays
demonstrated even by the men in Sicily, who
use a shawl for a head and shoulder wrap.
45 Our liberty-cap (compare the French bonnet-rouge)
is the modern representative of the pilleus, the cap which
the Roman slave donned at his manumission to Symbolize
his freedom and which everybody wore at the Saturnalia
as the token of liberty.
[90
C L OT BII N G
In the house both sexes wore slippers and
Sandals, out of doors boots and shoes, nor was
there anything to distinguish between those of
men and women except perhaps that the latter
possessed those of better quality and finish.
Men did have, to be sure, shoes which de-
clared by the differences of color, ornament
or fastenings the social or official position of
the owner. Their use of straps or thongs,
encircling the ankle and lower calf, would now
be best illustrated by the footgear of very
humble rustics, such as the ciocie worn so
largely in one region of Italy that it is often
called La Ciociaria. The use of wood for
shoes and Sandals is also perpetuated in Italy
as well as exemplified in the French sabots
and the English clogs.
Roman women wore an inner tunic so much
like that of the men that we can imagine an
interchange to have been at times a family
convenience, at times a provocative of trouble.
They supported the bosom by a breast band
of soft leather, but wore nothing that can
properly be likened to a laced and boned cor-
set “ either beneath the dress or, as often
46 This is sound as a general statement, although Sig.
Castellani once showed me figurines in his collection
[91 )
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
among Italian peasants of today, outside of
it. They resorted to gentler means to improve
the endowments of nature, but were already
engaged in the fight against that obesity which
is still the chief menace to Italian beauty.
An upper tunic, the stola, the ultimate for-
bear of the ecclesiastical stole, was the dis-
tinctive apparel of a Roman woman and
safeguarded her in public much as the dress
of a Salvation Army lass does its wearer. It
usually had short sleeves, if the undershirt
lacked them, was girdled and reached to the
feet, where in the case of the matrons “ there
was a border to distinguish them from the
unmarried girl.
As an outer garment women wore a rec-
tangular shawl, white, black or colored, which
was commonly draped much as the toga of
the men in its simpler form. Anciently men
were as badly off for pockets as the women
were. Both had to trust to the folds of their
which pictured women adjusting what was amazingly
similar to a modern corset, nor must we forget that, long
before Rome was thought of, certain Cretan pictures ap-
parently of tight-laced men suggest the possibility that
our Urvater Adam may have taught Eve the practice.
47 Wives who had borne children were privileged to
wear a special type of stole in honor of their motherhood.
[92 J
C L O T H IN G
garments. There was, however, more excuse
for this inconvenience in the days when a
slave was at hand to carry anything that can
now be forced into the bulging pockets of an
uxorious husband.
Long hair and beard distinguished the early
Romans, but Hellenistic influence through
Sicily finally induced them to shave. A sight
of the bronze razors which the ancients used
wins credit for the tradition that the first in
Rome to shave habitually was a hero, Scipio
Africanus the Elder. In the early imperial
period a man’s first beard-cutting was often
made a festal occasion, and the clippings were
dedicated to Some god. Except for philoso-
phers, who had to look wise, and certain
youths, like the dandies of Cicero's day, who
had to “look smart,” and men of the lower
classes, who had no right to care how they
looked anyway, smooth faces continued in
style down to the reign of Hadrian whose need
to hide certain facial blemishes brought beards
into vogue again for a long time.
The hair was worn short, except when
mourning prescribed a total disuse of the
scissors even for the beard. Men, so-called,
even practised depilation. Curling the hair
[93 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
also was sometimes in fashion for men who
affected elegance, perfuming it always for
those who could afford the cost. The stronger
the odor, the longer the purse.
Since women of old were limited in the
amount of individuality and artistry that they
could show in the fashioning of clothes, they
had to turn such talents as were their legacy
from Eve — or was it Pyrrhap — to varying
their ornaments of jewelry and the dressing
of their hair. Consequently there is almost
no arrangement of natural or of artificial locks
that our last century of ingenuity has invented
that the patience of the archaeologist cannot
match with some ancient crown of glory or of
horror, unless perchance we must except a
coiffure recently popular among Neapolitans;
they fluff up their rather crinkly hair behind
so that it stands erect precisely as if the back
part of the head had been scared by some
canine adversary. But really the marvel of
even this is surpassed by the creations of court
ladies under the early Empire, as we know
them from surviving monuments and from
coins. No pen of mere man can describe their
towering magnificence (e.g., tier upon tier of
perfectly symmetrical curls), their compli-
[94 |
C L O T H IIM G
cated convolutions, their elaborate plaits, their
rhythmic undulations, least of all the hidden
amplifiers and supports that constituted their
true inwardness. Fortunately styles for maid
and matron were not the same. The former
displayed something simpler, for instance one
instead of two of the fillets that only the Ro-
man citizen could wear.
In contemporary Italy, women who belong
to the so-called peasant class are conveniently
identified by the fact that they go bare-
headed “except, of course, when labor under
a tropical sun leads them to top their hair
with many thicknesses of folded toweling,
tovaglie. In this they follow a wholesome
precedent set by the humble of antiquity. On
the other hand, a married woman of social
position was expected to have her head cov-
ered in the public streets, and, at one time,
failure to observe this requirement might
even cause a divorce. A Scarf or mantle was
sufficient veiling. Romans knew nothing like
our feminine hats and bonnets. Verily the
48 In the Italian quarter in New York one of the
Cinisi may say scornfully: “Look at that villana. In
the old country she used to carry baskets of tomatoes
on her head and now she carries a hat on it.” Park
and Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted, p. 147.
[95 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
sight of some of these would lay the ghost of
an ancient lady as quickly as that of a cig-
arette in the mouth of either sex would lay
the ghost of a man. But there are today in
Italy secluded villagers who have never seen
a hat on a lady's head. As an extra protection
against the severities of nature ribbed parasols
that opened and shut were already available.
Fans, too, were much in use.
The women of ancient Italy, though as a
rule blessed, as they still are, with beautiful
heads of luxuriant, dark, glossy hair, which
has a natural inclination to behave prettily
in curls and wavy tresses, used to envy their
own slaves of northern origin the possession
of locks of lighter hue. What is more, there
were those who would shave their own hair
in order to wear wigs of imported red or yel-
low, or, in default of these, they would apply
a chemical treatment that would make them
at first blonde but presently alas! bald. Even
the tonics, oils and unguents with which they
coaxed lustre into healthy hair or sought to
thicken it could not repair this damage, as
Ovid is rude enough to tell one of his sweet-
hearts in misfortune. The admiration for
light-haired children is still strong in Swarthy
[96]
C. L. O. T H IN G
Italy. For instance, at Caltagirone at Christ-
mas they have to select some three year old
to play the rôle of the Bambino Jesus and
with singular inappropriateness they regularly
choose a blonde.
It would be ungallant, however, for a man
even of our period to dwell in detail upon
all the mysteries of a Roman boudoir as lit-
erature and archaeology ruthlessly reveal them
to those who are curious of such things. The
rouge is yet to be seen in the toilet-pyx.
Pompeii discloses powder boxes of her ancient
belles. We read of women who dared not
expose their complexions to the sun lest the
enamel melt, their curls to the rain lest stringy
locks should result, nor even cough lest they
lose their teeth. Beauty patches were gummed
on marble brows sixteen centuries before the
days of Queen Anne. Hairs, badly disposed
from the point of view of comeliness, would
be removed with tweezers or a depilatory,
those absent altogether but needed badly
could be painted in with a dark pomade. As
a rule, however, incipient whiskers and adol-
escent mustaches were more likely to mar the
southern woman than baldness either sex.
But they stopped at nothing in their personal
[97 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
embellishment. Even a blue vein on a
whitened brow might not withstand the effects
of water, and rosy lips were not all that they
Sometimes seemed.
For the most part, however, cosmetics were
more largely used by the women of Greece
because of their rather harem-like existence.
To the credit of contemporary Italy be it
said that natural complexions are much more
in evidence there than in the United States,
where even negroes powder and where face-
paint is no longer as sure an index of indel-
icacy as it used to be. Of course, Roman
men were in this race of vanity and folly also,
but shame makes us forbear to tell just how
close they ran their rivals.
It is pleasanter to dwell upon the passion
of both sexes for jewelry. There was no point
of attachment to the person that was not in
use except that they neglected to pierce the
nose and lips. Women wore finger rings,
bracelets, armlets, necklaces, breast-chains,
earrings, brooches, jewelled buttons, orna-
mental hairpins, hair nets of solid gold, and
even anklets.” The passion still persists in
49 If these last were practically a monopoly of freed-
women, it was partly no doubt because the matron's
[ 98 ||
C L O T H IN G
Italy, where a baby needs be but a few weeks
old to enjoy its first earrings, while its peas-
ant mother may have pendants so long and
heavy that their removal is a proper prelim-
inary (as in Sicily) to any physical try-out
with a neighbor. Massiveness and weight
were characteristic of ancient Roman jewelry
also. There was considerable etiquette in its
use; for instance, in time of national sorrow,
one should substitute iron finger rings for gold.
For fastening garments, both sexes must have
used fibulae in no small number during the
course of a lifetime; for the quantity that has
been found is past calculation. While many
varieties of gems were in fashion for jewelry,
no cut stone had the value of a pearl in Roman
estimation; to secure primacy the diamond
had to await an age when workmen could give
it brilliant facets.
Men were denied the esthetic opportunities
that shirts, cuffs, neckties and watches afford
their descendants, but they could display
their taste in the choice of rings. One with
a signet was a real necessity, since sealing was
a usual protection not only for documents
stole was so long as to make the display of such circlets
difficult.
[99]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L II? E
but for money-caskets, food-closets, store-
rooms and the like. To this day, a bit of
sealing wax is a surer Safeguard against
robbery than most locks, as the traveller, ex-
perienced in Italy, well knows.
[ Ioo 1
VII. GODS

HE house had other inhabitants, not
yet discussed, whom its occupants
never forgot, namely the gods. It
was their presence that gave the Roman dwell-
ing that special sanctity and those who lived
in it the peculiar sentiment which we associate
with the word home — a new idea in the an-
cient world, a novelty still in much of ours.
The fire-spirit Vesta had dwelt in the hearth
ever since there was a flame to kindle. The
first storing of a food supply by the provident
brought into being the Penates or divinities
of the larder. The family would usually have
its own particular selection from among the
higher gods also, whom it revered much as the
Latin races their patron saints of home and
city. The master of the house had his special
tutelary deity, a sort of other self, the so-called
Genius, the procreative spirit responsible for
family continuity, while his consort had a cor-
responding divine being in her Juno. Under
the influence of Greek anthropomorphism, the
Genius is often imaged as a toga-clad figure
holding a cornucopia. Further, at Pompeii,
| IoI
R O M A N P R IV A T E L IF E
at any rate, both of these Spirits may be sym-
bolized by Snakes painted on the wall, a
bearded male for the Genius, a female for
the Juno. They used to represent them in
places they wished to keep undefiled, even as
Italians still paint the Christian cross on house
walls for the same purpose but with small
effect. Other protecting divinities, the Lares
(whether in origin local spirits, or those of
the family ancestors, or merely general spirits,
nobody really knows), abode with their human
friends in the likeness of youths, clad in short
tunics, who are dancing while pouring a liba-
tion, as it were, in their own honor. Nor
must we omit to mention the divine powers
that religious fear and fancy associated with
almost every action of daily existence without
ever visualizing them as painted or sculptured
figures. Home and land were as full of them
as a properly populated Irish village teems
with fairies.
For the worship of all these spiritual be-
ings " we find provision made not only by
shrines and altars in various parts of the
dwelling but also in more pretentious homes
50 The Roman dii cubiculares, gods of the bedroom,
make us think of the saints and the Madonna and
| Io2 J
G O DS
by a separate chapel or oratory, as we might
call it, for their special use. Since the rela-
tions of the pagans with divinity were prima-
rily of a business nature, an interchange of a
quid pro quo, the two being as much out of
proportion to each other as Shrewdness could
contrive, we find them making vows of this
or that object in return for the god's boon.
These votives would then, on the receipt of
the blessing * asked for, be consigned to some
place where the god was localized e.g., the
private shrine or a public temple.” The offer-
ings that have come down to us are commonly
of the same sort that are used in Christian
churches all over the peninsula now, notable
being representations of every part of the hu-
man anatomy that can be impaired and cured,
and also pictures of all sorts of disasters from
Bambino that look down benignly from niche or frame
upon countless Italian beds. Moreover, even the most
sacred images suffer maltreatment, just as of old, when
disappointment in the divine protector has changed pious
faith to impious rage.
51. The obligation to pay was as solemn then as now;
compare H. F. Jones, Castellinaria, pp. 238 and 255.
* Where there are famous healing shrines as e.g. in
S. Agostino in Rome, nearby shops supply the ex-votos
quite as they did two millennia ago near the bridge that
led to the Temple of Aesculapius on the island in the
Tiber which served as a sort of hospital.
[IO3 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
which piety effects a rescue. The Madonna
receives now the same kind of art that Isis
got in the days of Juvenal.
If it was hard for the first Christians in
their proselyting to make clear to many of the
heathen such tenets as that prayer with no
material accompaniment was a fit offering to
a spiritual being, it is probably no less difficult
for us to realize all the effects upon a house-
hold of bloody sacrifices inuring increasingly
even the most sensitive to scenes of suffering.
But even modern children, if reared in a
slaughter-house, might not be squeamish
about the gore of a gladiatorial arena.
However much the public state religion of
Rome may have suffered by the close of the
Republic, we have reason to believe that
household worship was still vigorous and sin-
cere. This warmer, more emotional type of
faith which finds outlet today all over Italy
in the ever-burning taper, or (thanks to the
triumph of material progress over what is
poetical in life!) in the tiny electric light
before the Madonna's picture in shop and
home, may well have been much commoner
than were the scepticism and scorn of the
educated for all the fatuities of polytheism.
[IO4]
G O DS
There would seem to have been plenty of
pious souls who offered daily prayer and sac-
rifice in the morning as well as paid the due
rites at the evening meal, when in fact the
statuettes of the Lares might be set on the
dining-table as a reminder of heaven's part in
the procuring of its blessings. Then, too, im-
portant events in the family, such as birthdays,
required religious observances quite as much
as the festal days of the state calendar, nor
would these always mean merely such trib-
utes as burning incense * or a libation of wine,
but they might involve the slaying of a pig.
This brought a pleasing change in the menu
of the family, since deity generously shared
the best of the beast with his worshippers.
In all these sacrificial performances ritual-
istic accuracy was the main thing. Similarly
in Sicilian witchcraft today an incantation
must be letter-perfect or else it will not work.
A single slip will require the repetition of the
whole spell. From all this it may appear how
deeply Roman religion could affect domestic
life and that, too, for seven days out of every
week.
53 Although no longer needed to neutralize the odor
of burnt or bloody sacrifices, incense has never lost in
Italy its importance as a symbol or vehicle of prayer.
[IoS ]
VIII. DAILY LIFE

HE usual routine of a Roman gentle-
man's day at the capital is known
to us from literature. The possible
modifications of it due to the tastes or status
of the individual, to his place of residence,
or to the season of the year cannot be detailed
here. Among the Romans an hour was one
twelfth of the period between Sunrise and
Sunset, so that its length was constantly
changing. Moreover, the lack of our instru-
ments of precision made living according to
any strict schedule difficult. Sensitiveness to
the arrival or departure of a mere point of
time is, however, even today foreign to the
Italian nature.
The Roman rose in the neighborhood of
sunrise. In much of Italy a tourist is ready
to do so now, unless he be hard of hearing.
In some of the hill-towns one might conclude
that the poorer inhabitants all got up at four
and the richer went to bed at five. Between
the two, Martial’s complaints of sleep-destroy-
| Ioë
D AI L Y L I FE
ing noises are verified eighteen centuries later.
Old-fashioned people probably continued the
custom of starting the day with sacrifice and
prayer to the gods, in which the Servants
were expected to share as at family prayers
in our own more pious past.
The first meal resembled in its lightness
and brevity what we call the “continental
breakfast,” but, of course, there was no coffee
or other hot drink to enable the early riser
“to start the day right.” Bread was then
as at present among the poor of Italy much
more truly the staff of life than it is in Ameri-
can homes, now that the invasion of Soft
cereals has relieved us of the necessity of
chewing and therefore also, often, before mid-
life, of our more important teeth. We have
reason to believe that anciently ordinary
bread “ was hard and coarse enough to keep
the teeth bright and the jaws strong. Grit
from the mill-stones likened it to loaves that
one must still eat in primitive sections of Italy
or else go hungry. The baking itself might
add a few cinders; for they used what we
call a Dutch oven in which great heat is
54 At Pompeii at any rate the practice appears to
have been the same as in modern Italy to purchase the
family supply at a bakeshop.
[ Io'7 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
quickly generated by a fire of twigs and
brush. After the ashes had been removed, the
loaves were shut up inside to bake. This oper-
ation may be seen anywhere in Italy to this
day. The Roman made his bread more pal-
atable by a sprinkle of salt or by dipping it
in wine, as peasants do now, or, occasionally
by accompanying it with olives, raisins or a
bit of cheese. Milk or a mixture of wine and
honey would be the beverage of the hearty,
who also sometimes added eggs to their bill
of fare, especially if the breakfast were be-
lated so as to make unnecessary a noontime
meal.
Business or professional duties claimed the
hours immediately following breakfast. But
first of all came the salutatio, a morning re-
ception which for many generations fashion-
able usage forced upon society, although it
was as irksome to all the participants as cer-
tain functions that imperious Fashion still
imposes on her unhappy slaves. He who re-
ceived at such a levee as well as all the guests
had to appear in the toga of full dress,” and
the hurry from all quarters of the city on a
55 “Toga-wearer,” togatus, from its application to
parasitical clients gradually degenerated from an epithet
of honorable distinction to a term of contempt.
[ Io8 J
DAILY LIFE
hot day put those who came on foot in a heavy
perspiration and in no good humor long before
their arrival. The humbler among them
might have to submit to indignities from
haughty, toll-taking servants posted between
the front door and their lord in the atrium.
Moreover, the latter sometimes needed the
Service of his nomenclator or name-caller to
whisper Some account of approaching no-
bodies so that he might not inquire politely
concerning the wife of one who was a bachelor
or concerning an infant of the childless. The
memory of this usher would owe its perfec-
tion to ever-impending penalties only less
severe than those inflicted for forgetfulness
by an African prince upon his official “re-
membrancer.”
It was under the early Empire especially,
when the size of a man's following no longer
had any political significance, that the hang-
ers-on ranged through many grades of Society
and included brazen sycophants, professional
legacy hunters, chronic loafers, moneyless
prodigals and the like, along with perfectly
respectable people who had been made para-
sites by the system. Of course, friends re-
ceived a greeting that corresponded to their
[ Io9 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
intimacy and affection. Men kissed one
another quite as freely as we see them doing
it in Latin countries. The hand-kissing that
is so offensive to some Americans in Italy we
need not blame necessarily upon the Conven-
tional manners of the Bourbon period; the
custom was prevalent enough in Rome thou-
sands of years ago, and perhaps never died
Out.
Some of the morning callers would be asked
to attend their host on his way down town,
or perhaps be invited to dinner. In the days
when the size of a man’s retinue was an out-
ward token of his standing, the lesser sort
were expected to follow his litter through dust
or mud. In return for their humiliating ser-
vilities, these clients received not only the re-
wards that pensioners often do in our age, for
instance, a cast-off garment, a sum of money
or influential support in time of trouble, but
also a daily meal or its equivalent in money.”
The social degradation due to the fetching
away of food in a basket, received from the
hands of a Supercilious flunkey, and, in gen-
56 Parallels for this may be found in modern Italy.
See Under Petraia with some saunterings, pp. 122–123.
[ IIo I
D AI L Y L I FE
eral, the snobbery attaching to such relation-
ships need no comment here.
Various duties, Some of a purely social
nature, might fall to the morning hours of a
man of fashion such as visits of condolence
or congratulation, or to the bed of the sick,
canvassing to elect a friend or relative to po-
litical office in the days when electioneering
still counted for Something, or, at a later age,
listening to a semi-public recitation by an
author, who then risked in return a similar
boredom as an auditor of his former host,
serving as a witness at the signing of a will,
or attendance at the inauguration of a magis-
trate, a betrothal, a wedding, the naming of
a baby, or the coming-of-age party of a youth;
for it was the boy, not the girl, who had a
début in those days.
If none of these functions claimed a citizen
of the capital, he was likely to proceed to
one of the fora for litigation in the law.courts
or for business connected with his own
finances, or to perform his official duties, if
he were a senator or a magistrate, or merely
to lounge about quite as Italians love to do
in the town piazza. We must remember,
[ III ||
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
moreover, that public buildings were always
more public than they are today and were full
of rambling throngs. So, too, were the miles
of colonnaded ambulatories the convenience
of which is more generally recognized by
Italian architecture than it is by ours. Nor
was the capital without its beautiful parks
for promenading. If it chanced to be a holi-
day, our typical Roman would join the throng
going to the theater, the circus or Some public
games, according as opportunity offered or
fancy prompted.
Somewhere between eleven and twelve
o'clock he was normally free to eat his lunch-
eon. As a rule, this was a cold meal, but
more substantial than the breakfast, including
in addition to foods already mentioned, fruits,
nuts, salads and meats. With some it must
have been a mere snack such as people de-
vour at lunch-counters and in the railroad
restaurants. Whether the ancients went home
for it, or often had to resort to the cookshops
which abounded everywhere near the haunts
of business and of pleasure, we cannot tell.
Travellers in Mediterranean countries are
all familiar with the practice, especially ob-
served during the hotter periods of the year,
[ II2 |
D AI L Y LIFE
of devoting the middle of the day to rest, if
not to sleep. Vexatious as it is to find an
entire commercial establishment, bank or mu-
seum taking a siesta just when you wish to
enter its doors, you come to realize that the
custom is one of Italy’s sane traditions. The
urban populace really had to learn it from
the rural, and business in court and senate
does not seem to have stopped for it, as agri-
cultural labor did. However, the fashionable
came to accept it, and so we find in commodi-
ous homes even a differentiation of bed-
chambers into those for the siesta and those
for sleep at night, and during the Summer
season Rome in some sections was almost as
dead at noon as at midnight.” It was, indeed,
a time when story-tellers had the ghosts of
the dead appear, while our more careful con-
temporaries permit only wraiths of the living
at such an illuminated hour.
If the morning was claimed for work, after-
noon may certainly be said to have been de-
voted to play. Next, therefore, in the routine
came exercise and the bath. Since baths, as
a rule, were taken publicly in the company
57 Alaric took advantage of this to capture the city
in 410 A.D.
III3 J
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
of friends, they were regarded as a social
pleasure rather than as an annoyance imposed
by the threat of ill health. After the bath men
would indulge in a stroll, a loaf, a chat or
any other mild amenity of human intercourse
such as the Southerner still lapses into so auto-
matically that the supercritical are likely to
call him a worthless idler many times before
they awake to the fact that he is really living,
instead of merely working himself to death in
order to live.
By mid-afternoon,” the Roman of position
was ready for his dinner, for which the exer-
cise and bath had been an appetizing prepa-
ration. Its perhaps minimum length of three
hours must not, however, be interpreted as
a proof of gluttony nor even its prolongation
to five or more; for, as we shall see, the
succession of slowly-eaten courses was inter-
spersed with much frolic, conversation and
even professional entertainment. The fast set
would follow this dinner with a drinking-bout
in many ways resembling a German Kneipe,
but, as a rule, the respectable citizen and all
those whom age made cautious omitted this
58 From nona, meaning the ninth hour, comes the
Danish word none which means a “collation.”
III.4 |
D AI L Y L I RE
and retired at once to bed at what we should
consider a rather early hour. The lack of
our brilliant illumination saved Romans from
much temptation to turn night into day, and,
almost as important, the absence of instru-
ments for measuring time with precision made
our stop-watch and split-second type of civ-
ilization impossible.
[ II5]
IX. SOCIAL LIFE
UT we must now take up in detail some
B of these various occupations of the day
to which we have only summarily al-
luded. Fashionable life in the twentieth
century compels attendance at many functions,
some delectable, others depressing, afternoon
teas, musicales, card parties, mixed dances,
evening receptions and theater parties, which
were unknown to the Vanity Fair of two mil-
lennia ago. Moreover, to gratify the gregari-
ousness of man we have club-houses and other
special buildings to which the great bathing
establishments of Roman cities offer the only
approximate parallel.
Let us consider for a moment the most im-
portant of our own amusements, dancing.
This engages almost everybody nowadays who
has two feet out of the cradle and at least
one foot out of the grave. But Cicero, who
moved in the best society of his age, could
say of it: “Practically nobody dances when
he is Sober, unless mayhap he has lost his
[ II6 J
S O C I A L L I FE
mind.” Our androgynous dances, even minus
“trot ” and “hug' and “shimmy,” would
have shocked Terpsichore to a mortal death
as being possible neither to masculine dignity
nor to feminine pudicity.” Even solo danc-
ing that was probably much more decorous
than certain Oriental performances that are
by no means unknown to American respecta-
bility drew the censure of decent people at
the close of the Republican period as voluptu-
ous. In general, Roman parents anticipated
modern morality in deputing to the daughters
of others dancing that would demoralize their
own, and at home and on the stage enjoyed
without a qualm the talent and beauty of
hirelings. In having others do much of their
singing and dancing for them, except in so far
as they belonged to the ceremonies of religion,
they were unlike the Greeks who valued
highly personal accomplishments in both these
59 Tarantism is just as endemic in the larger cities of
Italy as in our own, nor can the mania be attributed
today to any bites of the tarantula. As a matter of
fact, the famous Italian dance, the tarantella, probably
owes its name to Taranto, which anciently was a Greek
city. A woman who is tarantata may dance for three
whole days. It remained for asininity in our own country,
however, to conduct voluntarily Terpsichorean “Mar-
athons ! ”
[ II 7 ||
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
arts. But these different attitudes towards
social pleasures bring up the larger question
of etiquette and gentle manners. Had the
Romans already their inviolable conventions?
If Cicero or Caesar were suddenly to ap-
pear in a modern drawing-room, there might
be embarrassment on both sides, but anybody
familiar with the social life of their time
knows that the old Romans would impress the
assembled guests as gentlemen. Some of us
suspect that they might at once become the
dominant figures by reason of their personal
magnetism and noble bearing, but their man-
ners would, of course, be different. Even
specialists in the Classics, however, unless
they have directed particular attention to the
matter, seldom realize what a code of etiquette
already existed twenty centuries ago with ex-
acting requirements. In fact our earliest
Classical literature, Homeric epic, offers us
in the meeting of Odysseus and Nausicaa a
charming picture of fine manners. Long, long
before our era, the socially insecure had to
worry about what people would say of their
behavior. Mrs. Grundy is a very old charac-
ter — old enough perhaps to die. In the Ro-
man metropolis the best bred of our race would
[ II8 |
S O C I A L L I FE
have offended occasionally, even as a lady or
gentleman will blunder among foreigners to-
day, if untutored in their conventions. Table
etiquette would have tried us the most, but
there was also much ado about precedence.
But after all, these would be largely matters
of outward deportment and not dependent
upon qualities of the heart. The really sig-
nificant fact is that the men — those, for in-
stance, of Cicero's or Pliny’s letters — were
dealing with one another with a notably
modern, I almost said Italian courtesy,” but
that might be saying too much. Of course,
they had their vocabularies of invective which
left nothing to be outdone by the proverbial
fishmongers of Billingsgate, but such vituper-
ation was a tradition in public oratory and no
more a criterion of the vilifiers’ real nature
than much of the obscenity of ancient comedy
and satire is that of their authors. In general,
however, the Romans seem to have been de-
nied the genial affections that came so readily
60 One may safely appraise the quality of a tourist's
breeding by his estimates of Italian manners. For a dis-
cerning characterization we may refer to M. Carmichael,
In Tuscany, p. II, and to G. B. Taylor, Italy and the
Italians, pp. 263-265. For the German point of view I
know no better reference than the interesting critique in
Victor Hehn, Italien, Chapter VIII.
[ II9 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
to the Greeks and in this particular to be
strange ancestors of the friendliest of modern
peoples.
The one social entertainment to which in
default of so many of ours they attached a
major importance was the dinner-party. In
fashionable society the evening meal was
probably regularly a guest affair, even if there
were no special occasion, such as a birthday,
to celebrate. This is in sharp contrast with
social life in present-day Italy, where dinner-
parties are as rare an entertainment as they
are usual in either England or America. The
meal belonged, as we have seen, to the second
half of the afternoon and to early night. If
one would make it fashionable, he had to
advance the hour set, so as to steal something
from the business day. In the enjoyment of
a dinner-party both sexes might unite, an im-
possibility in Athens of the fifth century B.C.,
where women were confined to a seraglio-
like existence the last traces of which survive
in modern Hellenic custom. For example, the
afternoon refreshment in a semi-outdoor café
which is such a regular and mutual pleasure
to men and women in every Italian community,
is reserved in Greece almost entirely for men.
[I2O |
S O C I AL LIFE
Even more than the modern café the Ro-
man dinner-party Served as a newspaper, the
only evening “ daily ’’ that Society had; for
the gazette posted by government authority
was much too Scanty to Satisfy a race that
has always been eager for the latest news. It
was the interchange of opinions at table that
most assisted the work cf imperial spies when
they were making Rome politically a hell to
live in. Under some of the emperors, table
conversation ran more safely to discussions
as to which came first the hen or the egg, why
Jews forebore the most delectable of food, roast
pig, and which hand of Aphrodite Diomedes
wounded. -
The Romans adopted a Greek custom and
allowed men to recline at meals, while requir-
ing, until the more dissolute days of the Em-
pire, that women should sit, except when mem-
bers of both sexes were dining strictly en
famille. They observed this difference also in
banquetting their deities, laying the statues of
gods lengthwise on the couch but setting the
female figures upright. Children might sit on
stools within the reach of discipline but where
they would be the least bother to their elders.
The three couches of a dinner-set were
[I2 I
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
arranged around three sides of a square table,
with the fourth open for convenience of Serv-
ing. Three guests could recline comfortably
on each, resting on their left elbows with that
hand free to hold bread and using the other
to feed themselves. It was proverbial that the
number should not be more than the Muses
nor fewer than the Graces, since more than
nine persons would overtax the accommoda-
tions and fewer than three would result in
unsociable isolation. If the number was in-
conveniently small for this triclinium arrange-
ment, the host might use instead a semicircular
Sofa with a round table that fitted its curve,
while a large party necessitated recourse to
one of his bigger dining-rooms which held
two or more triads of couches. Moreover,
apartments with different exposures would be
selected to suit the season of the year.
Monied aristocrats could further indulge
their taste for display by employing tables
of rare and beautiful woods, the value of
which appears to have averaged much above
anything in corresponding use today. A round
slab from the citrus-tree sometimes cost over
fifty thousand dollars. Sideboards were likely
to be the only other furniture in the room.
| I22 |
S O C I A L L I R E
These exhibited pottery and plate, the design
and artistic decoration of which are still
imitated.
Good usage permitted a gentleman to bring
to a dinner-party one or more uninvited
friends. Such a supernumerary was called
his “shadow ’” but with no intent to express
the effect that his arrival would have upon
the spirits either of fellow guests or of the
surprised host. In the ancient home, servants
and reserves of food were alike too plentiful
for him to cause either anxiety or a shortage.
Since places on the couches varied in honor,
there was a chance for feelings both of pride
and of envy. At a stylish banquet, a special
servant, a sort of social secretary, we might
call him, located the guests with all the deli-
cate discrimination that modern snobbery
could devise. The same functionary seems
sometimes to have had the further task during
the course of the meal of elucidating any
culinary mysteries" that were set before the
puzzled diners. While such an expert might
61 Some protection might seem necessary against cooks
who could manufacture anchovies out of turnips and
mushrooms out of gourds. Since antiquity already had
its advocates of vegetarianism, they might have been
useful in restaurants for the herbivorous.
[I23 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
occasionally be welcome at a modern banquet,
we should have missed at Rome, on the other
hand, some niceties to which we are accus-
tomed. Thus, there was no insistence on hav-
ing individual plates, and probably no fork
or knife with which to facilitate eating. These
implements were reserved for the use of a
carver, whose training in a special school with
wooden models for practice might make him
one of the most precious of slaves. He had to
vary his gestures and professional flourishes
to suit each viand that he carved, and his
graceful attitudinizing actually won for him
the same name that Latin uses for dancers.
Incidentally this is one of the indications that
the art of dancing was not concerned with the
feet alone.
For his soup a diner might have the use
of a spoon, if he did not prefer to sop it up
with a hunk of bread, which then, as now
in many an inn, might later feed the lurking
dog. The only other use for the spoon was
for an egg in the soft state, which otherwise
defies neat consumption, unless one “drinks
it,” as the Italians say.
Nothing could be more absurdly unjust
than to picture the dinner of normal Romans
[I24 |
S O C I A L L I FE
of wealth and Social standing as a scene of
wild license and beastly gluttony,” either be-
cause the guests might consume more than a
fifth of the day at the table or because Latin
satire has left us such lurid accounts of ex-
ceptional excess. When we read that even
such a pattern of propriety as Pliny the Elder
apportioned three hours to his dinner, although
he was so niggardly of his time as to continue
his literary studies actually in the bath, we
may believe that it was not gulosity but rather
sociability of some sort that was responsible
for the prolongation. As a matter of fact,
various diversions might be intermingled, such
as comic acting, dancing, music and recita-
tions, all of which may accompany a modern
meal though with rather different purposes.
Thus, in the old days, as I have already
stated, the guests themselves would not dance,
so long as they retained the inhibitions of
62 Voluntary vomiting of one meal to give room
and appetite for another was no more usual in society
than drunkenness is now, but our contemporary cicerone
loves to localize and picture that scene in some ruined
apartment that he is showing. I once saw humming-
birds in walnut shells in the refrigerator of a famous
American hotel, but they could not be justly termed a
Common pièce de resistance at one of our banquets any
more than the heels of camels or the tongues of night-
ingales and peacocks were at a Roman imperial dinner.
[I25 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
sobriety, but they enjoyed performances by
professionals. Nor could such men as Cicero,
a master and a lover of conversation, have
foreseen the utility of a hotel orchestra in
rescuing diners from reciprocal stupidities at
the small cost of drowning out a few sporadic
utterances of sense. Much less could even
such an ascetic as Cato have anticipated an
age when the reading aloud of some spiritual
book in a college refectory would be regarded
as a desirable offset to the carnality insepa-
rable from all eating. None of them could
have guessed that the survivals of their cus-
toms would take such peculiar forms. No,
Roman gentlemen did not have to save them-
selves from ennui or from overeating. It is
true, of course, that in the quality of their
conversational wit and wisdom they fell short
of Greek symposiac standards and that
“authors’ readings ’’ must often have equalled
the tedium that after-dinner speeches now so
commonly bring to all but the Speakers, but
it is equally true in spite of all the fulmina-
tions of sensational satirists that their table
luxury was moderate when compared with
much that escapes all censure from our pres-
ent-day pulpiteers. Such matters are purely
[I26 ||
S O C I A L L I FE
relative, and the typical Italian, when judged
by our metropolitan standards of living, was
and he certainly still is a temperate, not to
say abstemious man.
The Roman began his dinner by an in-
vocation of the gods which may be likened
to the saying of grace, although the recogni-
tion of divine power on Such occasions was
probably more universal in the pagan past
than in the Christian present. Guests who
had come to the party in their litters, as even
healthy men might with propriety by the time
of the early Empire, would already have their
house-Sandals on, but persons who came on
foot had to take off their shoes at the door
and put on the sandals which their attendants
had been carrying for them. These were then
removed at the dinner-table, since good form
prescribed bare feet on the couches. During
the meal a man's own lackey cared for the
discarded sandals and to ask for them corre-
sponded to calling for one’s carriage today;
for putting them on was a sign of intending
departure.
After the removal of their sandals the
guests washed their hands in water brought
by the servants along with the necessary
[I27 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E LIFE
towels, a finger-bowl system which was more
justified where everybody was presently going
to dip for his food into a common dish, as
among Some Oriental peoples of today. This
washing was repeated after each course.
Waiters brought in and removed the dishes
by means of trays and cleaned the table at
each replacement. The Romans did not come
to the use of a tablecloth until napkins” had
been long in vogue. The stealing of the latter
by “ kleptomaniacs’’ was such a common
vexation as to be referred to in literature.
The floors of stone and cement were so
easily washed that diners did not hesitate to
throw on them any refuse from the table
for the animals to eat or servants later to
Sweep up. A famous mosaic pavement has
been preserved to us which pictures the rem-
nants of a banquet so perfectly that one is
almost tempted to pick up the bones, shell-
fish and lettuce leaves or scare away the
mouse that is enjoying them. Under the
Empire young aristocrats would use at ban-
68 The guest's use of his napkin to carry away tidbits
from a dinner-party aroused the satire of Martial, but I
have chanced upon a rather close parallel in the experience
that J. A. Symonds had in Venice, as he narrates it in
his Italian Byways, p. 224.
[I28 J
S O C.I.A. L. L I FE
quets a special dinner-dress of Greek origin
called a synthesis. Dudes went so far as to
put on a new one, of different color proba-
bly, for each course, a custom that luckily
does not control the wearing of the Tuxedo
even by a fool. During the Saturnalia, the
festival of Saturn, which in many particulars
resembled our Christmas season, men would
wear their festive garment everywhere in place
of the toga, along with the so-called cap of
freedom.
The typical dinner was tripartite. First
there was an appetizer, the like of which is
still usual at a Swedish or a Russian banquet,
although it was not so liable to sate instead
of whet the desire for food as is that north-
ern bane to the temperate eater. Next, at
least three courses formed the heart of the
meal, which was succeeded by a dessert
which the Romans called the “second
tables.” Some of the appetizers of the first
division might appear on one of our menus
among the hors d'oeuvres, oysters, salt or
pickled fish, raw onions and lettuce with
various piquant Sauces. But eggs also
figured, which are rather filling, to say the
least, and the drink was a mixture of wine
[I29 J
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I R E
and honey, which also would seem to us any-
thing but a whet. Wine was served during
the rest of the meal, too, but in a moderate
amount and regularly mixed with water; for
to drink it undiluted was reckoned a display
of barbarism. Italians (including some vend-
ors) still water it.
The dinner proper which now followed
consisted of meat and vegetables served in
three or more courses. The dessert of cake,
pastry, nuts and fruit was so sure to include
the last that a proverbial expression for the
idea “from beginning to end ’’ was “from
the egg to the fruit,” as we might say of a
modern dinner “from the oysters to the
nuts and raisins.” The dessert was preceded
by a more formal tribute to the household
gods, an offering of the salted meal-cake and
a libation of wine.
The table of a Cicero or a Pliny would
certainly provide us with food at least as
palatable as we are forced to eat in the Clas-
sic lands if we stray from the beaten paths
of tourist travel. For frying they used to
use olive oil. The Italians still do, when
they can escape its imitations. In fact, olive
[I3o
S O C I A L L I F E
oil may be listed with bread and wine as
the permanent staples of Italy’s food supply.
The extraction of the oil may be described in
the same terms for any period of Italian
history, nor can one See at a modern vintage
much that is not pictured in ancient bas-
reliefs. They still tread the grapes amid
Song and merriment and have not given up
entirely the storing of the wine in goat skins
or pig skins. One who has seen the latter
process in Greece or Italy understands just
what is meant by Matthew IX. 17: “Nei-
ther do men put new wine into old bottles:
else the bottles break and the wine runneth
out, and the bottles perish: but they put
new wine into new bottles and both are
preserved.” The Roman, it is true, knew
butter, but merely as a medicinal plaster.
The same description would answer today
for some that is served as food in capric
regions, but neither milk drinking nor butter
eating is usual with Italians. Cheese was
common, though often made from the milk
of animals whom we allow to retain it for
their nursing young. Ewes, mares and buf-
faloes even now serve the Italian dairy. For
[I31 J
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I F E
sweetening purposes the ancients depended on
honey, although Sugar also was already
known but as part of the pharmacopeia rather
than of the cuisine.
We should furthermore miss various fruits
and vegetables that are ordinary enough
with us, especially tomatoes and potatoes. On
the other hand, most of us forego certain
viands still eaten with appetite in Europe
such as dormice and young kid. Those who
have eaten capretto arrosto know why
Horace's tears for the kid he sacrificed were
of the crocodilian variety. The Roman bill
of fare might also include the flesh of cranes
and of the wild ass. Snails “ of both the
marine and the land variety, sea urchins and
mussels, and the ink or cuttle fish have
never lost their popularity at least among
such Italians as have little choice. The
evidence for the use of macaroni is not con-
vincing, although some believe that instru-
ments for making this now national dish
of Italy are to be identified among the finds
of Pompeii. By the period with which we
are chiefly dealing, home-made bread was
64. They are esteemed the special delicacy for the cele-
bration of St. John's Day.
[I32 |
S O C I A L L I FE
uncommon. They depended for their supply
upon the public baker, as is so universally the
case today in Italy.
Speaking summarily we may say that the
Italian used to be and still is, so far as he
has been uncontaminated by luxury and
foreign custom, a small meat eater.” The
World War has given thousands of soldiers
their first carnivorous cravings. Ancient
armies indeed regarded the substitution of
meat for grain as one of the hardships of a
campaign.” A sort of porridge made of spelt
was long as much the stock dish as macaroni
is today, and it continued to be so among
the poor, ages after most people had much
enriched their diet. The vegetables make a
lengthy list with beans, onions and garlic
placed high. To be sure, the latter two lost
caste, with an increase in refinement, and in-
spired abuse in literature that we wish might
65 The problem of refrigerating food is still unsolved
for much of southern Italy. Snow brought down from
the mountains is often used for cooling purposes, even
as it was in ancient days.
66 We may note in this connection the experience of
the Marchese Guerrieri-Gonzaga, a landlord of Mantova,
who, so L. Villari, Italian Life in Town and Country,
pp. 54–55, states, began to distribute meat among his
peasantry, but he soon discovered that they sold it to
buy polenta instead.
[I33 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
induce the modern peasant to a more tem-
perate indulgence in them.
Some fruits that are now common in Italy
are due to importation and naturalization in
Roman times, such as pomegranate, almond,
peach, apricot and fig, but there was an
abundance of native growths also. The ab-
sence of oranges and lemons would have
attracted our attention most.
All kinds of fowl and feathered game
were popular, especially the peacock. But
the pig is the one animal that came to be
consumed more largely than any other, and
they spared almost nothing from the end
of his snout to the tip of his tail, esteeming
as especial delicacies parts that the fastidious
now ignore. Fish figured as food for the
rich, who used to raise their own in artificial
ponds at great expense as edible pets.
In the case of the jeunesse dorée and of
others who were loth to lose all the gilding
of youth a wine supper might supplement
the regular dinner, a poor imitation of the
Greek symposium. Although the Germans
had already achieved the concocting of beer
two thousand years ago, it had not yet
crossed the Alps, nor were the more alco-
[I34 |
S O C.I.A. L L IF E
holic beverages known at all. At their
drinking-bout the Romans sought to delay
the too speedy oncoming of a disabling in-
toxication by using a profusion of Sweet
Smelling flowers, there being a quaint fancy
that roses shared with an amethyst ring an
especial potency for this purpose. Besides
flowers scattered over the table and floor,
others would be worn in wreaths or garlands
around the head and neck. In a close room
the odor of these "" mixed with the heavy
scent of perfumery and with the fumes of
the wine and lamps would prove too much
for a modern visitor.
There was an etiquette observed in drink-
ing which reminds us of later inventions of
the bibulous. A cast of the dice determined
who should be master of the revels so long
as mastery was possible. This man of luck
probably prescribed the proportions in which
the wine and water should be mixed, the
67 The modern Italian, while apparently less sensitive
than we to outdoor Smells, is yet strongly averse to
the presence of cut flowers in the house, and prefers an
artificial bouquet, if he must have a floral decoration.
At the time of childbirth in particular women are
guarded scrupulously against the odor of either perfumery
or flowers, according to W. W. Story’s Roba di Roma,
II. p. 501.
[I35 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L IF E
rules that should govern the drinking and the
penalties that must be paid by transgressors
and blunderheads. Everybody had to drink.
Toasts were pledged according to a ruling
that required a small ladleful of wine to be
consumed all round for each letter in a sweet-
heart's name. Neither amethysts nor roses
were of much avail where tributes to Cyn-
thia or Amaryllis preponderated over toasts
to Ida and Anna. Each glass had to be
drained at a draught. The presence of loose
women was by no means unusual, and the
Spanish and Syrian dancing girls would seem
to anticipate cabaret entertainments of re-
cent date. Gambling was common and the
stakes ran high. The return of inebriates
through the dark and scantily policed streets
of Rome was a menace to belated wayfarers,
with whom they played the “Mohawk ’’ and
“Apache,” and no doubt increased the in-
somnia of the sleepless in their beds.
Second only to a dinner-party as a social
event must have been the bath and exercise
that preceded it. Presumably among the
majority of this world’s inhabitants a bath
is regarded and often reluctantly regarded
as an unavoidable necessity. Even among
[I36 )
S O C I A L L I FE
those who seek a weekly cleanliness the
night before the morning into which they con-
centrate all their godliness, the periodicity is
sometimes broken. Originally, among the
Romans the dictates of health and the con-
straint of society rather than pleasure kept
a man to his duty. The national costume
left arms and legs exposed to the dust and
dirt; its woolen material puts special com-
pulsion upon the wearer in a hot climate to
wash his body. Accordingly, the earlier Ro-
mans gave their limbs a daily bath, their
body a weekly, or, to speak more accurately,
in the country, at least, a bath for every
market day. But towards the close of the
Republic all this changed. Daily ablutions
came to be recognized as an invigorating
pleasure * which belonged to the routine of
the day as much as the dinner itself which
it regularly preceded. What is more, even
persons who could afford to have comfortable
bath apartments in their own homes would
prefer the sociability of the public estab-
68 Accordingly, it was no reflection upon a guest to
greet him with the question “Won't you take a bath?”
and men in power used to curry favor with the pro-
letariat by giving them the use of baths and barbers free
for a certain period.
[I37 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
lishments; for Italians seem always to have
been a most gregarious people. Several of
the thermal plants could accommodate a
thousand and more at a time and Satisfy their
desire for any known kind of bath, plain,
plunge, or shower. Of course, the therapeutic
value of baths, especially of mineral waters
and of hot springs, was recognized fully in
antiquity. It was a fashionable “cold water
cure * * that restored Augustus to health
and killed his adopted son Marcellus. More-
over, by their time, massage was already
available for those who were too fat or too
indolent to better their circulation by activi-
ties of their own.
For the exercise which was the proper pre-
liminary to the bath, Romans adopted all
the inventions of the Greeks, quite as nations
that are now backward in sports look to
England and America for their equipment
and instruction. Connected with the thermae
they had ball-courts, wrestling-places and
69 Although personal cleanliness is just as much the
rule among the educated of Italy as it is among those
of our own land, the Anglo-Saxon propensity to take
a cold water bath every morning is an idiosyncrasy
which, like walking in the sun, or, in fact any long
walking for mere pleasure, an Italian finds it hard to
understand.
[I38 ||
S O C I A L L I FE
stadia. For the Social pleasures they pro-
vided gardens, lecture rooms and conversation
halls. Even libraries might form part of
the immense edifices. Such a resort calls to
mind certain casinos in European watering-
places. The person familiar with Rome
thinks at once of the stupendous remains
of the Baths of Caracalla or of Diocletian,
but similar plants of goodly size were to be
found wherever the influence of Rome pene-
trated.
Only a nominal bath fee was charged, less
than a cent for men, perhaps twice as much
for women, while children up to a certain
age received the encouragement of a free
admission. No bathing suits were worn. At
first the sexes had different baths or used
the same apartments at different hours.
Eventually, however, mixed bathing was
allowed; but for women this promiscuity was
possible only to such as no longer had any
decency to lay aside with their garments.
While any order of procedure prescribed by
individual inclination or by a doctor's advice
was permissible, a bather commonly passed
into a warm anteroom from the locker apart-
ment where his own slave was expected in spite
[I39 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I R E
of all diversions of gossip to guard, against
the ever-present bath-thieves, the garments
his master had taken off. In this warm tepi-
darium, as it was called, he started perspiration
in preparation for the next chamber which
made him sweat profusely, before he took
in it his hot bath. He would avoid enerva-
tion from this by a cold bath in the next
room, or, if he preferred some warmth of the
Sun, he would plunge into an open air swim-
ming pool. A complete establishment would
include an anointing room in which the
bather finally was scraped with a strigil,
rubbed down with towels, and then, to pre-
vent catching cold, anointed with perfumed
olive oil. In the disrobing room, when he was
not unlucky, he again found his clothes. An
extra, domed chamber with a heat exit at the
top was also sometimes provided in which
the bather could take a Turkish bath hot
enough to sweat out original sin with a life-
time of accretions. These sudatories were,
in fact, especially valued by invalids who
wished to start their animalistic life over
again in spite of their deteriorated machinery
for self-indulgence.
[ I40 |
X. AMUSEMENTS

AVING spoken of the three regular
pleasures of the day's routine, we
shall next consider the various
amusements which might engage much of the
rest of a Roman’s leisure.
However austere and grave we may imagine
the Romans to have been during their early
history when gravitas or moral earnestness
would be high in the listing of the virtues
and men interrupted the strenuous toil of
pastoral and agricultural pursuits merely to
initiate every March a military campaign of
imperialism from which they returned only
in time to gather in the harvest, the day
came, long before the commencement of our
era, when a love of amusement became a
prominent characteristic of the people. It
still is. One of the first and last impressions
of the foreign visitor is the pleasure-loving
nature of the Italians and furthermore their
readiness to be pleased with very simple
things. In truth, they derive from mere
living a kind of childlike enjoyment and
[I41 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I F E
gaiety that are denied the Anglo-Saxon tem-
perament. Americans, indeed, often remark
with a touch of envy that the Italians never
seem to have grown up. With this prolonga-
tion of youthfulness we may connect more
virtues than faults. It is a quality that may
be expected in a land where it seems to be
Spring Somewhere always. In a smiling
country Smiles ought to be infectious. Even
the widespread mourning and excessive pov-
erty consequent upon the World War have
not entirely destroyed the Italian propensity
to laughter and song. This is especially true
towards the south where the struggle is less
severe and the paucity of money probably a
little more uniformly distributed. Only he
who has listened entranced to the wild aban-
don of Neapolitan singing at midnight or in
country districts to the stornello in its minor
key as it passes from field to field, can quite
appreciate this side of Italian character.
Even where conditions are truly grievous, the
normal Italian refuses to take them so.
“Pazáenza " is his favorite word of Self-
exhortation " and the facility with which he
70 Il mondo & di chi ha pazienza, runs the Italian
proverb.
[I42 |
A M U S E M E N T S
smiles and slips into merriment accounts
for much of his unmatched racial charm.
There is plenty of wit and humor in ancient
Latin literature and its satiric turn has de-
scended to the modern people.
It is true, however, that the Italian has
always been less creative in his play than
some more staid races. He is prone to seek
his amusement from entertainment offered
by others. Even many of the games of
childhood that we have already mentioned
were of Hellenic derivation. In any case,
by the beginning of our era Rome had cer-
tainly become a wonderful amusement center.
Even the street corners and open squares had
their itinerant performers of every sort.
Singer, clown, prestidigitator, juggler, diviner,
story-teller, Snake-charmer, gathered their
circles as readily as in Italian communities
today. What would bore to melancholy an
American crowd illumines Italian faces with
delight. Puppet-shows have a tradition of
two thousand years and more. But these
one does not need to be an Italian nor very
young to find highly interesting in their per-
fected form. Even opera is not beyond the
attainments of the burattini.
II43 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
The importance of one goddess, Fortuna,
among the deities of Rome may be gauged
from the power and persistency of the gam-
ing passion which she has fostered. Mark-
ings on pavements brought to light in various
parts of Italy bear witness to the pastimes
of ancient boys and loafers, and these can
still serve for apparently precisely the same
games of today. In truth, gambling enjoys
unparalleled popularity among our contem-
porary Italians and provides through lotteries
a chief source of revenue for the govern-
ment. In many a home one is more likely
to find a book of instructions * about the
numbers that will win (composed, of course,
by some philanthropist who forbears to enter
the field himself) than he is to chance upon
a Bible. The Romans of old gave an extra
Zest to gaming by prohibiting it by law. An
exception was made at the time of the Sat-
urnalia,” even as the straitlaced Puritans
of England allowed indulgence in the corre-
71 The ancients had their dreambooks, but the smorfia
that tells you what numbers to pick for the lotto is
rather an advance over anything that they possessed.
72 This is not the place to note in detail the parallels
between the celebration of the pagan festival and the
customs of Christmas and of the Festival of Befana on
the Eve of Twelfth Night.
[I44 l
A M U S E M E N T S
sponding Chirstmas Season, and as, at all
times in the year, the elderly were granted
dispensation of a little final wickedness be-
fore they died. All others in the community,
however, while recognizing with the law the
social perniciousness of the vice, enjoyed it
themselves as often as they could escape
the official eye. Betting was essential to the
popularity of the chariot races in the circus,
as it is to our sports of diamond and gridiron,
and cock fights were held for something more
than the excitement of seeing the feathers
fly. -
Dice were, of course, the most convenient
implements for a “quiet game.” Dicers used
cubes with the same arrangement of pips
as ours, but also astragals which had only
four sides on which to fall. Loaded dice have
been found, proving that players of old put
more trust in a bit of lead judiciously placed
than in prayers and promises to Fortuna.
The gambling game that can be heard from
the greatest distance today is morra.” The
two participants, usually in a ring of fasci-
78 M. Graham, Three Months passed in the Moun-
tains East of Rome during the year 1819, p. 153, com-
pares it to a game played by children in England “Buck,
buck, how many horns do I hold up?”
[I45 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I F E
nated on-lookers, yell in unison the number
which they respectively conjecture to be the
total of fingers extended by both simultane-
ously from a closed hand. The din and ex-
citement are startling to a foreigner who nears
a group for the first time, and he soon com-
prehends why the law has at times banned
morra as being too fruitful of violence and
murder to be tolerated. The Egyptians were
playing the game ages before the Romans.
To judge by representations in Classic art,
gamblers sometimes guarded against the perils
of angry impulse by clasping with the unen-
gaged hand opposite ends of a stick. This
insured at least a moment for reflection be-
fore the fisticuffs began; it may, however,
have been used merely as a tally-rod. A Ro-
man proverb aptly declared that an honest
man was one with whom you could play at
flashing fingers (micare digitis) even in the
dark. -
Americans touring Italy are so often balked
in their business or in their sightseeing by
unexpectedly finding a building closed be-
cause of a secular or a religious holiday that
they can readily believe that under the Roman
Empire also holidays were two or three times
[ I46 |
A M U S E M E N T S
as numerous as they are in the United States.
By the middle of the fourth century, the cal-
endar actually assigned one hundred and
seventy-five days to public games. Religious
festivals came, indeed, with such frequency
that we may be sure that they did not always
put an end to secular labor. Their effect upon
business was probably more like that of the
Sabbath upon a present-day Italian community
than upon a Vermont town. A festa provides
a combination of trade, religion, eating and
sport that the ancient would have found en-
tirely natural.
Holiday seasons gave opportunity for the
free public games that are so characteristic
of the civilization of ancient Rome. It is hard
for us to comprehend how the circensian,
theatrical and amphitheatrical shows could
ever have originated in attempts to gratify
Some deity at a festival; for from a Christian
point of view their popularity appears to be
almost directly proportioned to their degree
of wickedness. And yet it was not until the
fifth century and probably much later that
gladiatorial shows were finally stopped, nor
ought we to forget that even in this year of
grace Terpsichore, Fortuna and other pagan
[ 147 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
deities would not be so very ill at ease at
certain Protestant church entertainments.
In ancient Rome, however, the shows were
not merely a public amusement, but an occa-
sion for distributions by the emperor of val-
uable gifts and money, which reminds us of
Souvenir performances in our own playhouses.
What is more, they constituted great mass-
meetings at which the people could register
their feelings upon public questions as em-
phatically as by any modern system of voting.
The emperor, therefore, attended the shows
partly to feel the public pulse.
Although the Italian has ever displayed an
innate gift for improvization and dramatic
expression, which is observable today in pul-
pit, court “ and legislative hall hardly less
than on the stage, the theater anciently en-
joyed none of the popularity that it possessed
in Hellenic lands, or now has, as the chief
Italian pastime. The Romans always got more
pleasure through their eyes. In the drama,
comedy rather than tragedy interested the
74. Ciceronian efforts to sway the emotions rather than
the reason have not lost their power with judge and
jury, and Pliny’s delight in applause would have been
amply gratified, could he have pleaded in Some Italian
courts. See Deecke, Italy, pp. 267 and 322.
[ I48 |
A M U S E M E N T S
mob, and by the inception of the Empire this
had to take the form of mime, pantomime *
or farce, if it were to gratify the public taste
for what was exciting and Salacious. No na-
tion of antiquity would have welcomed so
warmly our moving picture shows, especially
such pictures as the censors suppress.
Although the capital counted a city popu-
lation of probably a million at the time of
Christ, it possessed but three permanent
theaters, and, as a rule, plays would be given
only on festival days. These, curiously
enough, came more frequently in the heat of
summer than in what we call the theatrical
season. The three playhouses were all open
to the sky" except in so far as awnings were
occasionally spread as a special inducement
to attend. Moreover, they could be used con-
veniently for only daylight shows. Since
morning came to be the usual time for a per-
75 As everybody knows, Italians possess an auxiliary
language of gesture that especially among the vivacious
southerners is a marvel of efficiency. The deaf and
dumb are much less seriously afflicted than they are with
us, being by right of birth adepts in silent speech. Stage
pantomimes are still highly popular in Italy.
76 At Nîmes, Orange and Paris the ancient outdoor
auditoria have all been put to theatrical use successfully.
From one playhouse in Florence they simply remove
the roof in the heat of summer.
[I49 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L T FE
formance, matinée would not have been in
those days a misnomer.
In the regular drama men had to play the
rôles of women, as boys did in Shakespeare's
day, but we know of no instance where a male
had to play the part of a female temporarily
disguised as a man, as in the case of Rosalind
and Portia. The ultimate employment of
face-masks made this androgynism easier and
facilitated the assumption of several char-
acters by one and the same actor. Before the
introduction of masks, wigs of different colors
also helped to identify, even at the great dis-
tances of playhouses that seated as high as
ten thousand auditors, the red-haired slave,
the black-haired youth and the white-haired
father.
The stage setting was as primitive as in
England in Elizabethan times. At the begin-
ning of a play the curtain dropped into a slit
at the front of the long, high and somewhat
shallow stage, instead of rising. Thus the
heads of the actors were revealed before their
feet, a proper courtesy, even though the latter
might be, as ever and anon today, the more
intelligent and entertaining portion of their
anatomy. The regular scene for comedy was
[I50 |
A M U S E M E N T S
a street. Fronting on it were represented two
or three houses before which all action had
to take place. This would always be truer
to real life in Italy than with us,” for there
is scarcely any physical act or domestic em-
ployment that one may not Sooner or later
witness with a house façade as the background.
Actors at Rome were slaves or ex-slaves
and accordingly the former used to be liable
to a flogging, should their histrionic efforts
fail to please, an encouragement to the better-
ment of the drama that has not altogether lost
desirability. The modern Thespian who only
within recent years has won the social recog-
nition due his art may read with interest a
Roman municipal law which barred from cer-
tain positions of honor thieves, butchers and
actors, a tell-tale coördination.
Naturally players could command but small
respect from an audience that would include
nursing babies as well as noisy and inatten-
tive patrons of a larger growth, ready to leave
at a second’s notice, if news came of some
more sensational counter-attraction outside.
Still, later, the great Molière had to contend
77 No one could bring out the contrast with more
sympathetic charm than Mary A. Hopkins in her “Whom
the Land Loves,” in The Atlantic Monthly, 622 (1922).
[I51 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I F E
with similar difficulties, and Italian theaters
even now admit nursing infants and persons
potentially obstreperous. One of the worst
... evils was a claque such as French theaters
still harbor, although fortunately partisanship
now is rarely more than a comical combat of
hissing and clapping and it no longer occasions
the tumults and bloodshed that sometimes
occurred in an ancient showhouse. Actors
bantered their audience from the stage as in
cheap plays today. In Ovid we find another
rather modern note when he tells how the
prettily dressed ladies of his time used to go
to the theater to see the shows but no less to
be a show themselves.
The seating in the playhouse involved dis-
criminations which the privileged guarded jeal-
ously. In those days no keeper of a dive could
sit next to a senator through the mere pos-
session of money. But alas! women were
assigned to the top of the auditorium, while
boys were curbed by being seated next to
their pedagogues. Soldiers and married ple-
beians also had their separate places. So too,
bankrupt knights, we are told, a merry com-
pany. To make everybody more comfortable
in the heat they sometimes sprayed the great
[I52 |
A M U S E M E N T S
overhead awnings with a pleasant-smelling
Saffron-water.
Akin to the dramatic exhibitions were cer-
tain public competitions in oratory, poetry and
music which the Romans adopted from the
Greeks along with athletic contests of a Hel-
lenistic type. We wonder whether the singing-
matches in improvised verse that have their
vogue among certain classes of Italians are
an unbroken tradition from antiquity. Their
existence in the sixteenth century in the form
of the tenzon is well known to scholars. Even
bands of music play in competition now, and
no community is too small to boast possession
of one. Among the physical contests boxing
alone could be made sufficiently thrilling to
interest the Roman and that only by making
the hand-covering a death-dealer through the
insertion of metal knobs and even spikes in
the leather thongs that composed it. As for
the literary and esthetic entertainments, they
always seem an acquired taste for the Nation
of Mars, quite out of harmony with the Ro-
man racial instincts.
The masses really felt more at home in the
circus where in fact all classes congregated
with unalloyed delight and men and women
[I53 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
might chatter and flirt with a freedom that was
handicapped elsewhere. In Italy horse-racing
is of great antiquity “ and the Palio at
Siena twice a year demonstrates that it
can still command the hectic interest
of an Italian crowd, and if the winning
horse shares in the outdoor banquet of
the contrada, there is excellent Classical
precedent for such hospitality. Ultimately
ancient Rome devoted to the sport her most
magnificent building, the Circus Maximus, in
which from one to two hundred thousand
spectators of both sexes assembled under the
open sky.
The long running-space was divided for
about two thirds its length by a wall, orna-
mented with shrines, statues, a central obelisk,
etc. A short distance off from each end of
this medial “spine,” as it was termed, were
the rounding-posts, three pillars rising from a
base. Just as nowadays a far-seen bulletin-
board keeps the careless spectator in touch
with the progress of a football game, so in
the circus they had seven figures of dolphins
78 Only recently, I learn, Mussolini has revived the
old Roman chariot-race as one of his means of making
his countrymen more proudly conscious of their glorious
past.
[I54 )
A M U S E M E N T S
pivoted on a stand, the turning of which one
by one indicated the number of circuits the
chariots had completed of the seven required.
At the signal of the presiding officer four
chariots, as a rule, but in Some periods as
many as eight or even twelve, were sent away
from a series of small chambers or stalls at
one end. The charioteers exercised their skill
in blocking or fouling rival cars or in crowd-
ing them against the rounding-posts, since the
smashing of a competitor’s chariot was an in-
cident likely to afford the most pleasurable
of all thrills. Persons who would now lose
all interest in a trapeze-performer or in a tight-
rope dancer, should these bring their appa-
ratus too near a soft mattress on the ground,
can readily sense the attitude of the ancients.
The driver maintained his foothold in the
bounding car and controlled his horses, two,
more commonly four, but sometimes six or
seven or even more, with the help of reins
that were fastened around his waist. Accord-
ingly, if spilled, his only hope for life de-
pended upon his cutting the reins as he was
dragged along by the panicky horses, Scram-
bling to his feet and dodging the following
teams. For this emergency he carried a sharp
[I55
R O M A N P R IV A T E L T FE
knife, stuck in the thongs with which his body
and thighs were protected. A leather cap,
shoulder-pads and Shin-guards likened him to
our players of the gridiron.
The element of partisanship which is such
a factor in the enthusiasm of our schools and
colleges at outdoor sports was provided at
Rome by the racing syndicates which fur-
nished the horses and drivers under contract
with the giver of the games. The charioteers
wore the colors of their corporation,” and the
betting on the red or blue or white or green
(and for a while gold or purple) would re-
mind us of the evil side of our own inter-
collegiate contests, while the madness of the
spectators over the victory found vent in an ad-
ulation of steed and charioteer that even a foot-
ball hero might envy. Riot and bloodshed
more than once figure in the history of ancient
horse-racing with a record of thousands of
lives lost. Bribery of drivers, a resort to
sorcery, the poisoning of horses and during
the race every conceivable trick were inevi-
table abuses where unscrupulous gamesters
79 Mrs. H. L. Thrale describes in her usual lively
fashion an imitation of this custom; cf. Mrs. Piozzi,
Glimpses of Italian Society in the Eighteenth Century,
pp. I 59–16o.
[156]
A M U S E M E N T S
faced the alternatives of financial ruin or
fabulous enrichment, and where successful
jockeying brought the charioteer himself the
sort of fame that a prize-fighter enjoys today
and relatively quite as much money. It is a
far cry from the Circus Maximus to the Eng-
lish Derby!
Besides the actual races themselves, there
would be much to remind us of the modern
circus. In the first place there was the
spectacular parade of those who were going
to participate. With the presiding magistrate,
clad in the gorgeous garb of a triumphing
general, at the head and with plenty of music
to draw a crowd, it passed through important
thoroughfares and around the race-course just
before the contest began. In the procession
were troops of horsemen, the chariots and
charioteers, and, escorted by priests, the stat-
ues of the gods borne in special cars of state
or on barrows, precisely as in Italian religious
processions the image of the saint or of the
Virgin rides on its vara.
While the spectators knew the joys neither
of peanuts * nor of pink lemonade, they
80 The cry of the Sicilian selling these American de-
lights “ Murricani l’” “ Murricani l’” would mean nothing
[I57 )
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
Sometimes received a distribution of food from
the emperor which would convert the crowd
into one that looked sufficiently like the pa-
trons of the sawdust ring. Moreover, there
were some very modern performances of trick-
riders, who leaped from one horse to another
and performed other acrobatic feats as they
galloped at breakneck speed, and of tame ani-
mals who did amazing things. We can
understand how elephants, camels and lions
might be put to harness — Had not Bacchus,
Cybele and the rest taught them how? — but
just how the first named beast was made to
write Greek, we can only guess; for it is
certainly more than we can any longer expect
college freshmen to do.
The circus was also occasionally the scene
of wild beast fights, the fascination of which
can never be equalled by our animal trainers
nor by anything seen in a modern menagerie.
They were called the “morning show,” be-
cause they were regularly staged in that
period before the gladiatorial combats. While
originally they may have taken the form of a
to Cicero, come to life once more, but he would surely
recognize his name and the chick peas that gave it in
the cry of the vendor of ciceri, sold piping hot from the
portable stove.
[I58 J
A M U S E M E N T S
hunt by experts or of contests between wild
animals turned loose in the arena, eventually
they became a nauseating butchery of often
defenceless human beings. A modern bull-
fight can give only a slight conception even
of what the dumb animals suffered. The
fighters might be criminals condemned “to
the lions' for heinous offenses against society,
but too often they were political or religious
offenders, and, as we know from our accounts
of the persecutions of the Christians, they
might include women and children. Much
ingenuity was expended upon making them
reproduce scenes from mythological or tragic
story which would involve their death by
some savage beast. Sometimes the emperor
with grim humor would institute among the
half-starved lazzaroni of his day a scramble
for all sorts of animals turned loose in an
artificial grove, anticipating by some centuries
the Neapolitan cocagna. These various shows
acquainted the populace with all the major
animals of our zoos, bears, lions, tigers, ele-
phants, crocodiles and hippopotami. Readers
who have perhaps seen at most in all their
lives a score of lions can with difficulty im-
agine the din and terror when four hundred
[I59 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I R. E.
of those kingly beasts were exhibited at a
single show to make the welkin ring with their
roars; but no one can doubt that centuries
of wholesale slaughter in Roman arenas are
responsible for the dwindling and actual ex-
tinction of some species of wild animals
around the Mediterranean basin.
The nearest modern parallel to these ancient
spectacles has been afforded by the bull-fight,
the national sport of Spain.” This has also
engaged women and children and has caused
the death of many brave men. It brings the
Successful an unmatched glory in the commu-
nity that has been coveted by even members
of the nobility, as the fame of being a gladia-
torial champion used to be in Rome in spite
of the normal social degradation of the con-
testants. Moreover, the passionate concern of
the fair sex in the convalescence of a wounded
bull-fighter can only be likened to the feverish
interest of high-placed Roman women in the
heroes of the arenic contest. Even the match-
ing of beast with beast is paralleled now in the
bull-fights at Panama, where as a pleasing
81. The dole-fed idlers of Rome demanded panem et
circenses, “bread and the circus races ''; the Spanish cry
is Pan y toros.
[ 16o
A M U S E M E N T S
variation a tiger is Sometimes let loose upon
the bulls. Nor must we forget that cockfights
still have votaries in all parts of the world,
although nowadays the police Sometimes add
an excitement that is neither anticipated nor
welcome.
Animal hunts, however, as well as gladia-
torial exhibitions more commonly took place
in the amphitheater, a monument peculiar to
Roman barbarism to which we now turn. The
Colosseum at Rome is, of course, the best
known among the many that existed in all
parts of the empire. Situated in the very
center of the capital, it stands as the most
lasting and incriminating memorial of all her
public amusements.
The elliptical arena was edged by a fifteen
foot wall. This might be faced with revolving
rollers to prevent the wild beasts of the show
from mingling with those in the seats to the
disadvantage of the latter. In some amphi-
theaters a ditch of water ten feet wide further
protected the spectators from any possible
leap. Running up to a top the height of which
must be seen in order to realize its full im-
pressiveness, were tiers upon tiers of seats,
[ 161 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
which accommodated some forty-five thousand
people, and there was standing room in the
edifice for several thousand more.
We must expect to discover in any ancient
people a certain amount of barbarity and
cruelty, nor is it difficult for us, looking crit-
ically at certain institutions of the Romans
and forgetting charitably a few of our own
age, to make unfair comparisons. Gladiators
were in great part prisoners of war who re-
ceived a chance for life instead of being exe-
cuted outright, as occasionally they still are
among nominally Christian soldiers, or of
being sentenced to a mere existence of igno-
minious servitude, an alternative almost as bad
as death. Of course, when foreign wars ceased
to recruit the ranks of these professional
fighters sufficiently, the Romans increased
them by condemning the worst of their crim-
inals to the gladiatorial schools, nor can we
forget that not only non-combatants taken in
war and, in time of persecution, peaceful Jews
and Christians, but also victims of petty or
baseless charges in the law courts were added
in order to keep up the ever dwindling number.
The Romans adopted this institution from
the Etruscans as a funeral ceremony under
[ 162 J
A M U S E M E N T S
the persuasion that the souls of dead men
liked blood, but under the Empire gladiatorial
contests had become a public show which the
people would owe to the generosity now of
Some private citizen, now of a magistrate and
again of the emperor himself. In other words,
the exhibitions were often as much a political
device to curry favor with the proletariat as
a free band-concert or the like can be today.
The reader will further recall how at the close
of the Republic companies of gladiators which
politicians maintained terrorized the capital
as bands of gunmen have Sections of American
cities.
The number of those who were entered in
a single show might be many hundred. They
had received careful training in special schools.
Although the business men who ran these were
gratifying a passion more general and com-
pelling than even that for drink today, they
were as far from being reckoned philanthro-
pists as saloon keepers have been in recent
ages, and they suffered from the ingratitude
of beneficiaries a similar social ostracism.
Eventually the business became extensive, so
that the state had to assume some of it and
provide public training-schools. The disci-
[ I63 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
pline, diet, exercise and special instruction of
these institutions made them comparable to
modern military academies with the intellec-
tual side omitted. The finished product was
an expert brute, who might, however, retain a
sufficiency of human feelings and sentiment to
make him loth to kill one of his own school-
mates in the public duel. But it was a case
of kill or be killed; the Roman mob did not
assemble to witness any hesitations of affection.
Gladiators usually fought in pairs, but more
rarely troops of them were used to represent
better the encounters of actual warfare. To
encourage partisan interest and produce vari-
ety, the combatants received different accou-
trements, fighting as Samnites or Thracians,
with the net or lasso, heavy-armed or with a
sword in either hand, on foot or in British
war-chariots, blindfolded or handicapped in
Some other way, according as the ingenuity
of cruelty might contrive. Even dwarfs and
women were introduced to quicken once more
the reactions of the jaded spectators.
Modern art has acquainted the layman with
the scene as the Classicist pictures it to him-
self. After the opening procession around the
arena, during which gladiators might pause
[ 164
A M U S E M E N T S
before the imperial box and utter the fateful
words “About to die, Emperor, we salute you,”
came the series of combats. First were sham
fights with which the populace had but brief
patience, then the encounters to a finish with
real weapons of death. Slackers were driven to
the slaughter by the shrieks of indignant spec-
tators and by the whips or hot bars wielded
by attendants. And it was worth while to
win popular favor by a spirited contest; for
it gave the defeated a chance for life. As soon
as the victor had his victim prostrate beneath
his pointed Sword or dagger, the latter raised
his finger as a plea for mercy to the presiding
officer of the games. This official generally
referred the decision to the spectators who
made clear by cries and signs whether the
vanquished man was to receive the death-
thrust or a release to fight some other day. In
the former case he was at once dispatched and
his corpse was dragged off the arena as igno-
miniously as a dead horse in the Spanish bull-
ring. The gore-drenched spot where he died
was sprinkled with sand, not to obliterate the
reminder of a frightful horror but to prevent
subsequent fighters from slipping.
A series of signal victories and rising
[I65 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
popular favor might win the gladiator his free-
dom. In token of this, he received a wooden
sword, such as he had originally used as a
tiro in his fencing lessons in order to avoid
the danger of wasting a man in a death out
of sight of the public view. Gifts and prizes
might make him a man of means, nor did he
lack a certain social acclaim from the masses
such as a prize fighter still may win in our
country.
In the arena of amphitheaters, as well as
in natural lakes and in artificial ponds exca-
vated for the purpose, the Romans also ex-
hibited the spectacle of a naval engagement
which might require the participation of
thousands of marine gladiators apportioned
between two fleets to represent the forces of
such historic enemies as e.g. the Athenians
and Persians. The alternate flooding and
drying of the Colosseum within the same day
was regarded as little short of a miracle in
hydraulics. The realism of these bloody naval
battles was occasionally heightened by the
introduction of sea animals in the water.
There were other aquatic exhibitions in which
nymphs and sea deities were represented in
[ I66 |
A M U S E M E N T S
their favorite element enacting the rôles ac-
corded them by mythological story.
From even this brief sketch of the public
games of the Romans the reader may estimate
the inordinate interest which they took in
exciting entertainments. We know that the
possibilities of the contests, the qualities of
the champions, and the tragedies that were
inevitable were common topics of conversation
among high and low. The interruption of
business in great legislative bodies of England
and America to follow the course of an
international prize-fight has therefore ancient
precedent. The contents of homes in antiquity
attested the owner's special interest in the
games, the frescoes he gazed at on his walls,
the smaller ornaments, the lamps he carried in
his hand, by their portrayal of scenes in circus,
theater and amphitheater. Moreover, Pom-
peian housewalls disclose advertisements that
are the precursors of present-day billboard
posters.
[167]
XI. TRAVEL
INALLY, we may turn to some nobler
and brighter aspects of pleasure seek-
ing. The traveller in Classic lands who
ventures into out-of-the-way districts, in de-
fault of even the humblest hostelry, will often
receive from private persons a hospitality “”
which recalls vividly to him the importance
of that virtue in antiquity. Anciently natives
of different countries formed ties of hospitality
with each other which were reckoned so sacro-
sanct that remissness in their observance was
a sacrilege and exposed the guilty to punish-
ment by the Supreme god himself. The use
of the same Latin term for both host and
guest (a phenomenon perpetuated in French
and Italian), indicates the reciprocal charac-
ter of the relationship. The two were under
82 Even an Italophile must admit, however, that in
these days at least the Greeks attain the higher general
level of hospitality, although the generous friendliness
of the Italian to an American who is at all simpatico
is notable.
[ 1681
T R A V E L
mutual agreement to entertain and protect
each other. They performed, in fact, duties
that fraternal orders now undertake for mem-
bers, even to the extent of nursing and
doctoring the stranger. For the most part,
however, the bond called for no more than
housing and feeding and mayhap for Some
assistance in business or in legal difficulties.
At the end of a visit, guest and host exchanged
tokens of hospitality, which might mean
merely sharing the parts of Some divisible
symbol. These would be kept as heirlooms
in the respective families. The presentation
of a token even by a distant descendant of
the original benefactor would secure the un-
grudging grant of a similar favor from a
descendant of the first beneficiary. In the
absence of an inn — and no person of refine-
ment would go to one anyway, if he could
avoid it — a traveller felt free to ask for
shelter at the most commodious house in the
community, nor need he dread the rebuff that
would surely be his in our cities, where he
might have the help of a third foot to quicken
his descent of the front steps.
It would be a misconception, however, to
picture Romans swarming over even their own
[ I69 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I R E
country for the purposes of mere sightseeing.
To be sure, they may be termed a travelled
people but it was education, a physician's
prescription,” official or private business that
sent them abroad.* Only occasionally before
the second century of our era do we hear of
trips for pleasure. In general, the Roman was
as reluctant to leave “the hub of the universe ’’
as a Parisian his beloved Paris. Campanilismo
is no new sentiment in Italy. Rome was life.
When business or climatic conditions did call
him away, he maintained as close connection
as he could with the capital by correspond-
ence, Sending special couriers of his own as
well as employing every other means of get-
ting a letter through. In the absence of a
public post-office system, travellers were
always acting as letter-carriers. If important,
he would send a duplicate through different
channels and the contents might be concealed
88 Doctors are only following the directions of col-
leagues two thousand years dead in sending consumptives
for the milk cure to Castellamare near Naples and other
patients to various medicinal springs that have never lost
their reputation.
84 In general the Roman would sympathize with Dr.
Johnson's attitude towards voyaging: “No man who has
contrivance enough to put himself into jail will go to
sea in a ship.”
[I7o
T R A V E L
in cipher. Post-office, telegraph and telephone
Systems make it more possible for a business
man to remain at home than anciently, when
men had to meet each other for oral discussion,
explanation and bargaining.
For sea-travel the wealthy few had their
own private yachts, but almost everybody had
to depend upon the sporadic sailings of
coasters, vessels so small ” as to be a guar-
antee of seasickness, and so likely to blow
astray that, lacking the compass, they could
attempt short cuts through the open sea only
in the best of weather. The Greeks, not the
Romans, were the sailors of Classical antiq-
uity. On land, of course, the traveller fared
better, since the Roman road system has been
equalled only recently and their vehicles *
were at least no worse than those that still
rack one’s bones in rural districts. The real
difficulty was to secure wholesome food and
potable water, a vexation that continues to be
serious in large sections of Greece and in
85 This does not mean that there were not also large
craft, such as brought the monolithic obelisks from Egypt
and such as the grain-ships from Alexandria.
86 It may be worth noting that the taximeter had
its ancient prototype in the hodometer invented by Hero
of Alexandria.
II 71 ||
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
lower Italy. Of course, along the main roads
of the latter country there was a sufficiency
of inns, such as they were, and under the
Empire trade centers would even have toler-
able hotels for transients.
Tavern-names like “The Cock,” “The
Elephant” and “The Wheel ” have a very
modern sound, but there were no modern con-
veniences to be found in them. Moreover,
the innkeeper could be called a Boniface only
in irony, since extortion and cheating were
his means of livelihood. His beds were hard
and had numerous permanent occupants that
made sleep difficult. Moreover, one’s fellow
guests might be of the rough sort and noisy,
even though the wine were too well watered **
to make them drunk. The smoke and smell
of the interior also sorely tried the finical. We
are not surprised, therefore, that men like
Cicero maintained their own houses of call and
private villas in many parts of the peninsula.
Thus an interchange of courtesies would al-
ways facilitate the travel of the well-to-do,
while any errand on state business assured
87 There was an astrological joke to the effect that
taverners were born under Aquarius the Waterman.
[I72 J
T R A V E L
them shelter everywhere either in the imperial
post-houses or through the hospitality of local
magistrates. But besides the robbers who
worked in the guise of innkeepers of both
sexes, there were also the professional bandits
and highwaymen to fear. From them even
arms and a retinue did not always save the
wayfarer. By way of compensation, however,
the Romans in most parts of the empire would
escape the rapacity of the money changer; for
his own coin was almost world-currency.
The traveller could divide a long journey
into stages, since outside of every town-gate
he counted on finding a public stable. Draft
animals ranged in size from the horse down
to the diminutive donkey and in disposition
from the mild ox to the mean mule.* Ancient
pictures show us a saddle similar to the struc-
ture of wood that the peasant now imagines
88 Italian animals have to bear much the same bur-
dens and abuse that they did in the days when Horace
used to gall the haunches of his stumpy mule with his
baggage and its shoulders with his corpulent self. While
the Sicilian blesses the ox for having, with its fragrant
breath, warmed Christ in the manger, he never forgets
that the ass ate the straw out from under Him; nor lets
the asino forget it either. Cf. E. P. Heaton, Bypaths of
Sicily, p. 174.
[I73 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
adds to his comfort on a donkey. Naturally
the Roman was slow to resort to horseback,
if he could possibly procure one of the two-
or four-wheeled carriages that were then in
use. For shorter distances comfortable litters
and sedan chairs were also available.” As
one reclined in the former, he might pull its
curtains together and take a nap. These con-
veyances came to great popularity among the
rich of Rome where traffic laws forbade the
use of vehicles during most of the daylight
hours. Even a palanquin borne by four to
eight burly slaves, preceded by footmen to
clear the way and followed by a considerable
Cortége of flunkies and dependants, could find
no easy passage through streets that averaged
not much over fifteen feet in width. But to
the highways and byways of an ancient town
we can give some special attention only
after we have paid a brief visit to a Roman
vacation home. -
The excursion of the well-to-do to some
89 To what extent persons susceptible to Seasickness
suffered in them, we can only surmise. Even a pope
has had difficulty to stomach his in the inaugural pro-
cession; cf. Headley, Letters from Italy, p. 118. The use
of a lettiga suspended between mules has only recently
become obsolete in Sicily, if, indeed, it has. It recalls
the basterna that bore the fine ladies of imperial Rome.
[I74 )
T R A V E L
family villa by the Sea, in the country or
among the mountains would have been much
more formidable, had they not kept such
places furnished and equipped with slaves
ready for their instant reception. Men of
fashion possessed them in widely separate
parts of Italy so that they had only to consult
their physical comfort at any season of the
year. To own one was really the sole way to
secure a holiday recreation, in the absence of
the great resorts and “cures '' that now cater
to thousands of every class. And yet how
much less necessary a vacation must have been
for city-dwellers who (in Rome at any rate)
had the purest of air and water and a life that
was so much less complex and hectic than that
of urban America! Of course, some resorts
drew not merely because of their wholesome-
ness but because they were centers of fashion.
For instance, Baiae in March and April was
a sort of Newport in the season. Antium was
a watering place of imperial fame, the birth-
place of two emperors, Caligula and Nero, and
it is still Rome's favored sea-resort.
The plan of a villa varied according to the
degree that it was to be used as a mere
pleasure home or at the other extreme as the
[I75 |
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
farm house of a productive estate in the
country.” We are told that the peristyle part
of the building was put at the front instead of
behind the atrium, as it was in city-dwellings.
Windows were more numerous and larger and
open logge were often a feature, as in the
upper story of Italian palaces now.
A gentleman's villa cared not only for the
physical side of man by its baths, exercise
grounds and garden promenades but for his
esthetic and intellectual interests by libraries
and art collections. Great attention was paid
to the beauty of the parks and gardens, and
in villas by the sea there were shore construc-
tions extending far out into the water. The
tides in the Mediterranean are so slight that
the scenery was not marred by the exposure
of mud flats twice a day, as upon so much of
our Atlantic coast. The sea is so salt that
its clarity and blueness are almost unexampled
elsewhere. Prospect towers, porticoes, em-
bowered pavilions, fish-ponds, canals and
aviaries were embellishments of the larger
90 The resemblances between Roman and modern
Italian farm life are too numerous to discuss here. The
fattoria with its activities, from those of the bailiff
down to those of the wide-horned oxen, afford our best
commentary for the writings of Cato, Varro and Virgil.
[ 1761
T R A V E L
estates. Landscape gardening was formal in
its treatment of shrubbery, trees, flower-beds,
trellises, grassy terraces and covered walks.
Italy's characteristic trees, the pine and cy-
press, are so architectonic that they may have
originally dictated the style. In any case sym-
metry and artificiality have remained the
Italian tradition.” Roman gardeners clipped
the box to form names and geometrical de-
signs. The latter were not only cones and
pyramids of vegetation but even imitations of
animals. Thus they showed a truly Japanese
delight in dominating nature and subduing it
to the hand of man. Vacationists amused
themselves by holding boat races or by merely
basking on the beach, as they still love to
do at Capri and on the Lido of Venice, by
pleasure rows and swims, and by hunting **
91 In spite of this formalism villas are often of an
exquisite beauty. It is no outrage to realism if Botticelli
or Filippino Lippi people an Italian garden with angels
when nightingales send out the invitation.
92 There is much use of decoys in Italy, since bird
life has been so largely shot off. Those who have seen
in Tuscany, a small owl fettered at the top of a long
pole which is raised high in the air that his puzzling
antics may attract other birds through their curiosity
and bring them within gunshot, may be interested to know
that the civetta is a long-suffering animal, having served
hunters similarly thousands of years ago. The birdlime
[ 177
R O M A N P R IV A T E L I FE
and fishing excursions. Literary men, how-
ever, cared most for these retreats as making
possible intellectual discussions and the reading
and writing of books. How difficult the latter
must have been in the metropolis, we can bet-
ter imagine after we have given some exami-
nation to the outdoor life of the populace.
and the nets that Italians use are an equally old invention
in their land. The Roman never was a sportsman in
the English sense of the term. The letters of Pliny the
Younger alone offer a sufficiency of melancholy evidence
of this.
[ 178
XII. STREET_LIFE

MAJORITY of town-dwellers two
thousand years ago Seem to have
spent a minimum of time within
doors. The climate has always enticed the peo-
ple out of their houses to do as much of their
work as possible under the open sky. This
accounts perhaps for that indifference to domes-
tic comforts that impresses pampered Ameri-
can visitors so profoundly. Naturally, Romans
whose means permitted them the possession
of a house with a courtyard could enjoy both
fresh air and privacy, but the majority must
have overflowed upon the public thoroughfare
quite as they do in the humbler quarters of
modern Italian cities. There you may see the
cobbler mending shoes, the basket-maker
weaving osiers, the butcher selling roast meat
from an entire spitted carcass, the baker neatly
laying out his loaves of dough on the road-
bed, or, worse still, the manufacturer of mac-
aroni hastening the drying and increasing the
weight of his wares by exposure to the swirling
dust. As for the other sex, who has not seen
[I79 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
that most charming and gossipy of women's
clubs, the gathering at the village fountain and
washing-tanks? Furthermore, all the opera-
tions of spinning wool and carding flax are on
public view, not to speak of such intimacies
as the nursing of the baby,” the combing of
their own beautiful tresses or the absorbing
Search in the thick hair of their children for
undesirable inhabitants with just the patience
that monkeys show in the zoo during a similar
interchange of courtesies. These scenes must
be of immemorial antiquity and there are
many more that are like them. Thus, the
Schoolmaster of old taught and spanked his
pupils in the open air. They still do at least
the former in Italian rural districts. Nor can
we omit from this list the beggar, ever ubiqui-
tous in Italy. His methods have not changed
in twenty centuries. Hill-slope and bridge-
head are still his favorite sally-points.
Moreover, you may answer a business ad-
vertisement in the newspaper for number 12 on
So-and-so street only to find that contiguous
houses are Io and I4 and that an enterprising
98 Italians of humbler position will do this in either
theater or art gallery; prudery about motherhood is not
noticeable anywhere in Italy.
[ 18o
S T R E E T - LIFE
financier has taken I2 to represent his place
on the sidewalk from which he greets you, as
beyond a doubt his looked-for customer, as
he sees you examining the houses in perplex-
ity. So, of old, Martial tells us how Rome
had become one big shop through the trans-
fer of business from the interior of buildings,
where at least some of it belonged, to the
sidewalk and street, where it blocked all move-
ment of pedestrians until the law interfered.
Whole streets were anciently given over to
special trades, just as now in Italian cities
you will find a Via dell’Argenteria, a Via dei
Calderai and the like. In the absence of our
great mercantile establishments, much business
was carried on by hucksters and peddlers,
whose street-cries are still echoed closely
enough by their descendants, especially in
Italy's southern cities. Cake and cookie shops
served the sweet tooth then as now, and names
of wines that make music in the odes of
Horace can still be heard in the locanda or
trattoria that represent well enough the old
caupona and thermopolium. Barber-shops and
doctors’ offices were the favorite lounge just
as today in small towns barber-shops and the
apothecary’s.
[ 181 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
Most of what has been said concerns pri-
marily the ordinary people, the tunic-clad
throng, but even the gentleman of two thou-
sand years ago who did no manual labor
haunted the public squares and porticoes,
transacting business, interchanging gossip and
learning the news. The circulation of canards
under the early Empire was no small amuse-
ment. They called it “selling smoke.” In-
deed, the traveller, fresh or, let us rather say,
tired from the strenuous life of New York or
Chicago, will never appreciate how busy a
pleasure-loving, sociable people can be in
doing nothing under a Sunny sky, until he has
himself seen and tried to live the café life of
a Greek or an Italian city. It is the sight
of this that usually leads to the sweeping
condemnation of an industrious nation as
loafers. City life offered the Romans the same
temptation, and towards the end of the Re-
public the capital had gathered in thousands of
a once universally sturdy and hard-working
race who could now say in all sincerity dolce
far niente.
But it would be a serious mistake to im-
agine that members of the upper classes lived
indolently. Their social life alone was a busy
[ 182 |
S T R E E T - LIFE
leisure sufficiently exacting to put them in a
fever of restlessness to which we often have
reference in the literature of the time. There
was much running from town to country and
from villa to villa without finding the relief of
peace and quiet. This is modern enough. On
the other hand, the city-dweller of today would
have noticed in ancient Rome the absence of
night-life due to the slight illumination of the
streets. Torch or lantern is still necessary in
many a village of Italy, if one would dare
the uneven and too often unsanitary streets
after dark. But circulation through the nar-
row thoroughfares of ancient Rome required a
retinue of armed slaves and torch bearers to
make it safe also from footpads and riotous
young blades. The latter were quite as belliger-
ent as the highwayman but they expected their
social standing to save them from any evil
consequences, quite in the spirit of Some of
our college boys.
Of the capital by day we cannot have a
vivid picture without visualizing the proces-
sions of all sorts that were frequently parading
the streets. They made Rome as gay and pic-
turesque as modern Italian cities periodically
become for the same reason. We may even
[ 183 ]
R O M A N PRIVA TE LIFE
surmise that a passion for them is a birthright
of this people. Those of old made a long list,
triumphal, lustral, priestly, nuptial and funeral.
Even the appearance of a praetor or a consul
with his necessary lictors and attendants made
a show. Sometimes details of the pageant of
today Strike the Classicist as an astonishing
reproduction of the old; the tonsured priests
of Isis come to life once more, torches or
candles again flare in the street, reversed, it
may be, as a symbol of mourning, a sacred
image rides high on its vara, shouldered by
those who are faithful to another belief but
with no less pride in their function.
Of festal life in the thoroughfares we have
but little information, but we hear of great
outdoor banquets like those that follow the
Palio at Siena and, to a less degree, like the
street feasting of the Piedigrotta at Naples.
Rustic celebrations, on the other hand, are
more fully described, and such seem a fore-
runner of the revelry, color, song and merri-
ment that we associate with the Southlands of
today. One thinks, for example, of the return
of the pilgrims from Monte Vergine to Naples
or of the somewhat Lupercalian, if not Bac-
[ 184 |
S T R E E T - LIFE
chanalian, features of the Feast of Saint Alfio
at Catania.
Roman streets were free from some perils
that now infest them, such as our vehicles of
harnessed lightning, but they provided a suffi-
ciency to discourage any sleep-walking. Up-
stairs lodgers had a habit of throwing refuse
from a window without calling out to the way-
farer or even confining the cast to objects
decently dry. The tourist in Italy who has
never been hit by a similar downpour has had
luck. Moreover, in the old days houses used
to fall down and conflagrations were a scourge.
Juvenal classifies such fires and collapses with
the interminable recitations of authors as typ-
ical city dangers; so they must have been
pretty bad.
[ 185 |
XIII. BURIAL

URING the course of this little
treatise my reader may have been
able to create for himself a some-
what shadowy figure of an old Roman. It is
now time to put what there is of him out of
existence as quickly as we may and give him
a decent funeral. One is tempted to say that
if the ancients had not died, they would not
have lived, so true is it that we owe an im-
mense amount of information about them to
what they depicted and deposited in their
tombs. Obviously some sort of belief in im-
mortality was general or else they would not
have laid away so many objects of utility and
ornament at no small financial sacrifice. A
study of customs concerned with the death of
a Roman is therefore unavoidable in any
treatise on his life. :
According to a conviction of that age, a
ceremonial burial of the dead was requisite,
if the Soul was not to haunt the home of the
living, unhappy and causing unhappiness.
[ 186 |
B U R I A L
They carried their persuasion of this so far
that where the corpse itself could not be re-
covered, they would still gratify the spirit with
its due funeral rites and perhaps erect a ceno-
taph for it. Furthermore, the man who found
the body of a stranger and failed to scatter
over it at least the three handfuls of dust that
constituted a ceremonial burial was sure to
suffer for his sinful neglect.”
In the Italian peninsula the shifting of cus-
tom between cremation and inhumation is an
important chronological and ethnological test.
If the Romans may be said to have begun
with burial, it is one of the many examples of
their notable conservatism that even during
the period that we are especially considering
when burning the remains was the prevalent
mode, a small portion of the body, commonly
a finger bone, would still be interred. Babies
who died before they were forty days of age,
slaves, the very poor who could afford neither
94 One wonders whether he sees a survival of that
custom in slightly changed form when the nomadic
laborer of the Campagna bares his head before a cairn
that marks a nameless grave, throws at least one stone
upon the pile, and then, crossing himself, proceeds on
his lonely way. The practice is noted by A. Cervesato,
The Roman Campagna, Translation by L. Caico and M.
Dove, p. 80.
[ 187 |
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
coffin nor funeral pyre, and those who had
excommunicated themselves by conversion to
Christianity were all disposed of at death by
inhumation. Criminals had their carcasses
exposed to the mercy of the heavens and of
its most repulsive creatures, the carrion birds,
in the “Potters' Field” of Rome. This was,
in very truth, a loathsome place. There were
great burial pits, not unlike those that were
still in vogue in Italian cemeteries up to recent
years, into which were dumped the refuse, the
bodies of animals and the pauper dead of a
city numbering a million souls. Hither re-
sorted not merely carrion beasts and other
scavengers, but the scarcely human witches to
secure the implements of their magic. Ulti-
mately, in the Augustan age, considerations of
civic hygiene compelled the covering of it with
a heavy layer of earth and its conversion into
a Sanitary pleasure park.
Roman law required cremation and burial
to take place outside the city walls. This
accounts for the long lines of tombs at the
side of the roads radiating from the capital
and from Pompeii, memorials of human pride,
suffering and affection, but indicative also of a
belief that the dead liked to lie near life and
[ 188 |
B U R I. A L
the living and that Survivors perhaps were
not so averse as the Sensitive are now to being
reminded constantly of death.
The external architecture of the Roman
tomb would be no novelty in any of our burial-
grounds, although it is rather such cemeteries
as those of Genoa and Naples that best re-
produce the forms of monuments that once
adorned the famous Via Appia on either side
for many miles. The flower-beds and trees
that were often planted around them would
also make them look familiar, but the interior
was frequently decorated, furnished and illu-
minated much as a dwelling for the living.
This is paralleled by some Italian sepulchral
chapels with their pictures and busts and the
ever-burning lamp in front of the figure of the
Madonna. The sculpture outmatches even Ro-
man realism. I am informed that at the
dwellings of the dead in the Campo Santo of
Milan the faithful leave their visiting-cards
on All Souls’ Day as evidence that they have
called. Besides the private sepulchres of the
Romans there were burial-places provided on
a large scale by joint stock companies and by
other corporate bodies. Some of these were
like the funeral guilds of modern Italy. Al-
[ 189
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I FE
ready at the commencement of our era they
were numerous and powerful. By regular
contributions and coöperative management
members assured themselves of a respectable
funeral and of a final resting-place that would
content their ghost. The columbaria which
they constructed received this name from the
resemblance of the rows of niches in which the
cinerary urns were set to the nests of a dove-
cote. In Italian Sepulchral buildings, however,
the places to receive the bodies are most like
those in the Christian catacombs.
As a man lay dying, a near relative might
kiss his lips to catch his soul as it issued with
the final breath. When the end had come,
those assembled would utter a wail, calling
him by name,” a custom traditional probably
from a time when such an address and such
keening would be regarded as a real criterion
of whether life was extinct or not. The eyes
were then closed, the body washed, annointed
and laid out on a funeral couch in the atrium
to look as natural and impressive as possible
in a toga and with whatever insignia of dis-
95 Similarly after the death of the pope the Cardinal
Camerlingo, tapping the dead man’s forehead with a
silver mallet, thrice calls him by name, and then re-
ceiving no reply declares him dead.
[ 190 |
B U R I A L
tinction belonged to him in life. The feet
were directed towards the door * to symbolize
his approaching departure on his last journey,
and a penny might be put between his teeth,
the fee for Charon's ferrying across the Styx.
This practice is still continued to some extent
in Greece and sporadically in Italy, although
the contents of graves for thousands of years
have disclosed a surprising neglect on Charon's
part to collect such fares. At the front door,
reminding us of the hanging of crape, were
branches of cypress or of pine which served
to warn callers that the pollution of death was
upon that household. The lying in State of
a distinguished citizen might last for days but
the humble had the privilege of a quick burial
with all desirable simplicity.
The obsequies of a prominent man were
such a soul-stirring pageant as to Constitute a
public entertainment for all who were not
personally afflicted by his death, nor can we
doubt that in a season of scarcity of the regu-
lar shows there were those who would yearn for
a funeral with its accompanying games. The
96 This accounts for a strong feeling that Italians
still have against placing the foot of the bed they sleep
on in that direction.
[I91 ||
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I R E
marchers carried torches, a relic of the time
when all burials were made after dark, but
also a point of resemblance to the wedding
procession which the cynical may have noted.
The danger that something else beside the
corpse might be burned at a funeral in Rome
necessitated extra services from the fire-
department in the narrow thoroughfares of the
city. In the case of a public ceremony a
town crier summoned to the parade by a set
formula of words. An undertaker assigned
places in line on the basis of worldly rather
than of spiritual values. The instrumental
music was enough to wake the dead, being
blared by horns and trumpets and shrilled by
pipes. But even this in early times had the
vocal addition of hired mourners * who sang
dirges and pulled at their hair as they marched
along. Occasionally there would be a mum-
mer to imitate the dead, to the no small amuse-
ment of the crowd. Actors were selected to
wear the portrait-masks “ of ancestors who
had held curule office, not excluding even such
97 I am informed that this practice still survived in
the nineteenth century in certain parts of Italy.
98 Death-masks of wax are used in Sicily but for a
different purpose. Consult G. Pitré, Catalogo Illustrato
della Mostra Etnografica Siciliana (1892) p. 83, No. 23.I.
[1921
B U R I A L
legendary personages as Aeneas and the Alban
kings. It would seem, indeed, as if the dead
really buried the dead and with a pomp com-
parable only to that of the triumphal parade
of some general. And yet persons familiar
with Italy cannot fail to recall in this connec-
tion spectacular funerals conducted by the
confraternità, shrouded completely in white or
black except for eyes and feet, lighted by
candles comparable almost to torches in size
and accompanied by a band playing truly
sad but resounding music.”
Anciently, the corpse, with face exposed, as
it still is sometimes in Italian funerals, was
carried on a lofty bier escorted by family,
freedmen, slaves and friends, all in the dark
clothes of mourning (although white was
eventually the privilege of women) and many
of them tearing their hair, beating their
breasts and lacerating their cheeks amid
lamentations that made funerals as proverbial
for their fearful din as they are with us for
solemn hush. When on occasion Sicilians halt
the funeral cortège for the delivery of a eulogy
of the dead, they are following ancient prece-
99 It was such a procession in Spain that Don Quixote
and Sancho mistook for a troop of devils.
[I93 ]
R O M A N P R IV A. T E L I F E
dent. At Rome this took place in the Forum
and the speech by a son or other close rela-
tive could be relied upon to laud the departed
and all his ancestors beyond the recognition
of the well-informed. Scholars suspect that
panegyrics of this sort are the ultimate source
of much that long passed for history with as
little justification as have the traditions that
are traceable to political pamphleteers and to
professional satirists.
At the cremation of a body there was fur-
ther opportunity for a costly ostentation which
Sumptuary laws proved powerless to stop.
For, along with precious perfumes and spices,
tokens of affection and expensive gifts were
cast upon the pyre. This was finally lit by
Some relative who kept his face averted as he
applied the torch. Water or wine was poured
to quench the embers, a last pathetic farewell
cried to the dead and all the participants were
purified of pollution by thrice sprinkling with
water. Only the immediate family still
lingered to collect the ashes, sacrifice a pig to
consecrate the place of burial, and then par-
take of food. At the house there was an offer-
ing to the Lares as the final lustration.
[194 |
B U R I A L
Nine days” of intensive mourning followed,
in the course of which the ashes were trans-
ferred from a cloth in which they had been
drying to an urn for deposit in the tomb. A
sacrifice to the Manes of the dead and a fune-
ral feast, at which the garb of bereavement
was not permissible, closed this period. But
One was expected to be in mourning for a near
relative ten months, the length of the old
Roman year, for more distant relatives eight
months and for children between the ages of
three and ten a month for each year of their
age. Nor even then was the memory of the
dead allowed to die; for there was an annual
public festival corresponding somewhat to All
Souls’ Day,” as well as anniversary memo-
rials of the birth or death of the deceased,
not to speak of a ceremony in March when
violets were laid upon the last resting-place
of the dead, and another in May when roses
100 We may compare the novendial period of mourn-
ing for a pope.
101 The consumption of beans and of confections,
fave, imitating their shape, that characterizes this season
of the year at Venice, recalls the use of black specimens
of this vegetable for the laying of ghosts so amusingly
described by Ovid in his Fasti. There can well be a
Survival in this.
[195 |
R O MAN PRIVATE LIFE
were similarly bestowed. All these were oc-
casions for offerings to be made to the gods
in their temples and to the spirits of the dead
at their tombs where lighted lamps and the
feasting of the survivors have their obvious
modern parallels. A notable oblivion has,
however, fallen upon the pagan practice of
pouring through pipes that led directly upon
the cinerary urn the good wines that the de-
ceased had enjoyed in life. In the Christian
heaven at least there seems to be an enforced
prohibition. In general, however, there was
a feeling that spirits in the other world should
be well treated in this. Nor is this without
parallel in modern nations. How familiar to
the student of the Classics is the superstition
current among the ignorant of Sicily, that after
the earthquake had destroyed Messina the
souls of the prematurely dead were seeking to
enter the living in order to live out their ab-
breviated term of years and in wrath at their
unfair treatment were responsible for de-
structive storms?
In fact, the lifeless relics used to be far
more an object of solicitude than they are now.
They even had to be safeguarded against the
spirits of evil by putting away with them
| 196 ||
B U R I A L
amulets such as are the magic nails so often
found in Roman tombs. Having been present
myself at the opening of a virgin sepulchre
which the mourners of two millennia ago cer-
tainly thought safe against any tomb robbers,
I know just how an archaeologist ought to feel
and how powerless any prophylactics against
evil really are. With which solemn thought
we may take leave of our dead Roman with
the usual ave atque vale.
| 1971
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
No treatise has been written, so far as the writer knows,
to connect Roman private life with that of Italy today.
The following bibliography is selected to meet the needs
of educated laymen who wish to study the subject more
thoroughly. Since the large handbooks mention most of
the other essential works, the writer hopes to escape any
display of that bibliographical erudition which so often
depresses the expert without adequately impressing the
ignoramus.
For his fuller account the scholar turns to such works
3S
BLÜMNER, H., Die römischen Privataltertümer”, in Iwan
von Müller, Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswis-
senschaft, iv, ii, 2. Munich, I9II.
MARQUARDT, J., Das Privatleben der Römer, 2 vols., Sec-
ond Edition by A. Mau, in J. Marquardt u. Th.
Mommsen, Handbuch der römischen Alterthümer,
vol. 7. Leipzig, 1886,
and to the special articles in:
BAUMEISTER, K. A., Denkmäler des klassischen Altertums.
3 vols. Munich, I889.
DAREMBERG, C., et SAGLIO, E., Dictionnaire des Antiq-
uités Grecques et Romaines. 5 vols. Paris, 1877–
I9 I9.
PAULY, A. F. voN, WIssowA, G., KROLL, W., Real-Ency-
clopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft. I3
vols. (incomplete). Stuttgart, 1894–1922.
DE RUGGIERO, E., Dizionario Epigrafico di Antichitä Ro-
mane. Rome, I895 Seq.
Brief but useful, particularly for the bibliography
under each heading, is:
LÜBKER, F. H. C., Reallexikon des klassischen Altertums8,
herausgegeben von K. H. J. Geffcken u. E. Ziebarth.
Leipzig, 1914.
Valuable also are various chapters in:
[ 2oI ]
B I B L TO GR AP H Y
CAGNAT, R., et CHAPOT, V., Manuel d'Archéologie Romaine.
2 vols. Paris, I916–192o,
and, for various special topics that have been slightly
treated in this book:
BLÜMNER, Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe
und Künste bei den Griechen und Römern. Leipzig,
1887. New edition of volume I, Leipzig, 1912.
GRASBERGER, L., Erziehung und Unterricht im klassischen
Alterthum. 3 vols. Würzburg, 1864–188I.
Those who read German readily will enjoy:
BAUMGARTEN, F., PoLAND, F., WAGNER, R., Die Hellenis-
tisch-Römische Kultur. Leipzig, I913.
PERNICE, E., Griechisches und Römisches Privatleben, in
A. Gercke und E. Norden, Einleitung in die Alter-
tumswissenschaft, II. i. Leipzig, I9Io.
On the other hand, the reader who has only English
at his command may resort not only to the special articles
II)
SMITH, W., WAYTE, WM., MARINDIN, G. E., A Dictionary
of Greek and Roman Antiquities”. 2 vols. London,
I9I4,
but to such reference books as:
JoNEs, H. STUART, Companion to Roman History. Ox-
ford, I912.
SANDYs, J. E., A Companion to Latin Studies”. Cam-
bridge, England, I92I.
The translation of L. A. Magnus, J. H. Freese and A.
B. Gough makes available the highly important work of
L. Friedländer, Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte
Roms in der Zeit von August bis zum Ausgang der An-
tonine 7, Leipzig, 19oI, under the title Roman Life and
Manners under the Early Empire. 4 vols. London and
New York, Igo8–1913.
Other comprehensive accounts are found in:
BECKER, W. A., Gallus”, translated by F. Metcalfe. Lon-
don, 1866. (New edition of the German, by H. Göll,
2 vols. Berlin, 188o–1882.)
DILL, S., Roman Society from Wero to Marcus Aurelius?.
London, I919.
202
B I B L IO G R A P H. Y
FowleR, W. W., Social Life at Rome in the Age of Cicero.
New York, Igo9.
GUHL, E., and KonFR, W., Das Leben der Griechen und
Römer8, herausgegeben von R. Engelmann, Berlin,
1893; translated from German 3d. Ed., by F. Hueffer.
London, 1875.
JoHNSTON, H. W., The Private Life of the Romans. Chi-
Cago, Igo3.
PRESTON, H. W., and DoDGE, L., The Private Life of the
Romans. Chicago, Igrg. (Notable especially is the
chapter on agriculture.)
THOMAs, E., Roman Life under the Caesars. (English
Translation) New York, 1899.
TUCKER, T. G., Life in the Roman World of Nero and
St. Paul. London, IQIo.
Nor should one overlook certain essays in:
ABBOTT, F. F., The Common People of Ancient Rome.
New York, 1911. Society and Politics in Ancient
Rome. New York, 1909.
BAILEY, C., (Editor) The Legacy of Rome. Oxford, 1923.
Much interesting matter is scattered through the work
of:
FRANK, T., An Economic History of Rome. Baltimore,
I92O.
For Pompeii, the reader may be referred to:
GUSMAN, P., Pompeii, the city, its life and art, translated
by F. Simmonds and M. Jourdain. London, Igoo.
MAU, A., Pompeii: Its Life and Art?, translated by F. W.
Kelsey. New York and London, 1904. (Professor
Kelsey has in preparation a new edition of this
indispensable work for English readers.)
Easily accessible for pictures of many objects men-
tioned in this book are:
SchREIBER, T., Atlas of Classical Antiquities. London,
I895.
and the
British Museum Guide to the Exhibition illustrating Greek
and Roman Life. London, 1920.
[2O3]
QBut Debt to Greece and 130me
AUTHORS AND TITLES
IOA.
IOB.
II.
I2.
I3.
I4.
I5.
I6.
I7.
18.
I9.
2O.
2I.
23.
24.
25.
AUTHORS AND TITLES
HOMER. John A. Scott, Northwestern University.
SAPPHO. David M. Robinson, The Johns Hopkins
University.
EURIPIDEs. F. L. Lucas, King's College, Cambridge.
AESCHYLUs AND SOPHOCLES. J. T. Sheppard, King's
College, Cambridge.
ARISTOPHANES. Louis E. Lord, Oberlin College.
DEMOSTHENEs. Charles D. Adams, Dartmouth College.
ARISTOTLE's PoETICs. Lane Cooper, Cornell University.
GREEK HISTORIANs. Alfred E. Zimmern, University
of Wales. º
LUCIAN. Francis G. Allinson, Brown University.
PLAUTUs AND TERENCE. Charles Knapp, Barnard
College, Columbia University.
CICERO. John C. Rolfe, University of Pennsylvania.
CICERO As PHILOSOPHER. Nelson G. McCrea,
Columbia University.
CATULLUS. Karl P. Harrington, Wesleyan University.
LUCRETIUS AND EPICUREANISM. George Depue
Hadzsits, University of Pennsylvania.
OvID. Edward K. Rand, Harvard University.
HoRACE. Grant Showerman, University of Wisconsin.
VIRGIL. John William Mackail, Balliol College, Oxford.
SENECA. Richard Mott Gummere, The William Penn
Charter School.
Roman HISTORIANs. G. Ferrero, Florence.
MARTIAL. Paul Nixon, Bowdoin College.
PLATONISM. Alfred Edward Taylor, University of
Edinburgh.
ARISTOTELIANISM. John L. Stocks, University of
Manchester, Manchester.
STOICISM. Robert Mark Wenley, University of Michigan.
LANGUAGE AND PHILOLOGY. Roland G. Kent, University
of Pennsylvania.
RHETORIC AND LITERARY CRITICISM. (Greek) W. Rhys
Roberts, Leeds University.
GREEK RELIGION. Walter W. Hyde, University of
Pennsylvania.
RoMAN RELIGION. Gordon J. Laing, University of
Chicago.
A UTHORS AND TITLES
26.
27.
28.
29.
3O.
3I.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
4O.
4I.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
5O.
MYTHOLOGIEs. Jane Ellen Harrison, Newnham College,
Cambridge.
THEORIES REGARDING THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
Clifford H. Moore, Harvard University.
STAGE ANTIQUITIES. James T. Allen, University of
California.
GREEK Politics. Ernest Barker, King’s College,
University of London.
ROMAN POLITICS. Frank Frost Abbott, Princeton
University.
ROMAN LAW. Roscoe Pound, Harvard Law School.
ECONOMICS AND SOCIETY. M. T. Rostovtzeff, Yale
University.
WARFARE By LAND AND SEA. E. S. McCartney,
University of Michigan. -
THE GREEK FATHERs. Roy J. Deferrari, The Catholic
University of America.
BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE. Henry Osborn Taylor,
New York.
MATHEMATICs. David Eugene Smith, Teachers College,
Columbia University.
LovE OF NATURE. H. R. Fairclough, Leland Stanford
Junior University.
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY. Franz Cumont, Brussels.
THE FINE ARTs. Arthur Fairbanks, Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston.
ARCHITECTURE. Alfred M. Brooks, Swarthmore College.
ENGINEERING. Alexander P. Gest, Philadelphia.
GREEK PRIVATE LIFE, ITs SURVIVALS. Charles Burton
Gulick, Harvard University.
ROMAN PRIVATE LIFE, ITs SURVIVALs. Walton B. Mc-
Daniel, University of Pennsylvania.
FOLK LORE.
GREEK AND ROMAN EDUCATION.
CHRISTIAN LATIN WRITERS. Andrew F. West, Princeton
University.
ROMAN POETRY AND ITS INFLUENCE UPON EUROPEAN
CULTURE. Paul Shorey, University of Chicago.
PSYCHOLOGY.
MUSIC. Théodore Reinach, Paris.
ANCIENT AND MODERN ROME. Rodolfo Lanciani, Rome.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3 9015 03981 6064

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