A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (26 page)

Augustus repaired eighty-two temples in Rome but never imposed any Roman cult, not even of his great-uncle Julius Caesar, on the provinces or on a defeated enemy. Trade,
sometimes in the shape of carpet-baggers, followed the standards of the legions; missionaries never. There were no wars of religion in the ancient world; genocide (or ‘ethnic
cleansing’) was unknown; controlled massacres occurred
in extremis
– for political or military reasons in Gaul, for instance, by Julius Caesar – but the motives were never
religious.

Indeed part of the success of the Romans as imperialists was their tolerance, acceptance and even takeover of the gods of their enemies. Shrines to those of Carthage were erected in Rome after
its destruction; the cult of Isis was condemned from time to time, banished by the austere Tiberius, restored by the exotic Caligula, and especially frowned on when Augustus had been propagating
the line that his rival Mark Antony was a nice Roman boy seduced by the wiles of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra. But did not Antinous, much later, the beloved of Hadrian, drown himself in the Nile,
as a sacrifice to the goddess, to protect the Emperor, or was he just losing his looks? The cult of Isis had been brought back by Roman soldiers from their Eastern campaigns and an illustration of
there being one religion for the rich – essentially a belief in the divinity of the power of Rome – and many for the peasants, the proletariat, the rank and file of the army, is the
story of the Consul Aemilius Paullus, who had to throw off his toga and take an axe to destroy a temple of Isis because no workmen could be found prepared to execute the decree.

Mithras was the focus of another seductive cult whose priests were adept at special effects and produced a textbook describing the mysterious power of rushing water in subterranean tunnels with
mechanical contrivances opening and
shutting doors. A more home-grown diversion, practised by some cults, was the propitiation of the god through the flogging of naked boys
laid on the altar (the thick red line of the lash being, as it were, the logo of Ancient Rome).

Two systems of philosophy from fourth-century-
BC
Athens attracted the Roman élite, both so all-embracing that they encompassed religion. The Stoics, so called from
the
stoa,
a painted corridor off the market-place in Athens, were inspired by Zeno, a Cypriot, who propounded views on every aspect of human thought from physics to epistemology (the theory
of knowledge). Their like of abstract discussion was too highfalutin for Roman taste, which also failed to take to the equally influential Plato and regarded Greek thinking as unsuitable for the
young; but Stoicism, modified by the grandee Seneca, Nero’s tutor and one of the richest men in Rome, and by the slave Epictetus, whose motto was ‘bear and forbear’, hit a chord
in Rome because it seemed to answer the uncertainty and danger of the times. The Stoic message was gloomy. Men are weak and miserable in the face of evil, outward calamity is an instrument of
divine training to be met with dignity and the contemplation of death (possibly by one’s own hand), self-discipline and respect for the dignity of the individual. Seneca at least practised
what he preached in this respect (in other ways being far from moral), disapproving publicly of slavery and committing suicide in the classic manner.

Epicurus was a contemporary of Zeno, less ambitious and less passionate, whose gospel was salvation by common sense (and nothing else). This philosophy, at first shunned in Rome, was promoted by
an amiable figure called Lucretius, of whom little is known, save that he did not die by his own hand after taking a love potion, as immortalized by Tennyson. In 55
BC
he
published a long poem,
On the Nature of the
Universe,
which everybody read, especially Cicero. He dismissed divine providence and the immortal soul as illusions,
sacrifices as absurd, maintained that all our knowledge comes from our senses and the world is fun as it is. The universe, he said, is boundless, nothing is created out of nothing, atoms are
indestructible, but man, through greed, is exhausting the resources of the planet. (This was
BC
. Lucretius was a very early ‘Green’.) We must enjoy and rejoice
in the manifold bounties of Nature, which we must study though we may never completely know. Who has ever heard the footfall of a midge?

Lucretius was a poet but he was also practical, warning against the use of dangerous beasts in warfare – ‘wild boars can turn on their employers’ – and the hazards of
intense love between human beings. Here he is on sex (translated brilliantly by Ronald Latham, Penguin): ‘So, when a man is pierced by the shafts of Venus, whether they are launched by a lad
with womanish limbs or a woman radiating love from her whole body, he strives towards the source of the wound and craves to be united with it and to transmit something of his own substance from
body to body. His speechless yearning is a presentiment of bliss.’ The results of love are disastrous ‘. . . a hard-won patrimony is metamorphosed into bonnets and tiaras . . .
entertainments, perfumes, garlands . . . to no purpose.’ Never mind, it will end badly ‘. . . perhaps he thinks she is rolling her eyes too freely and turning them upon another, or he
catches in her face a hint of mockery’. One is reminded of Lord Chesterfield, a truly Roman figure, and his view of love-making: ‘The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and
the expense enormous.’

Romans took to religions from the East but they detested that of the Druids. As we have seen, Claudius panicked at
the sight of a Druidic charm, a snake’s egg, in
court; his troops, about to engage an army in Anglesey, were literally sickened at the sight of Druid priests sacrificing children to appease their gods before the battle – but they went on
to win. That the Romans finally adopted Christianity, the most aggressive of the revealed religions, whose God came from one of their least respected provinces, with a Church of career priests, is
one of the oddities of history.

ROMAN FOOD

Julius Caesar as a priest of Jupiter, an appointment forced on him by Marius to prevent his taking up a military career as a young man, was also, as part of the vocation,
denied delicacies, and remained a moderate and fussy eater. Augustus, for political reasons a fair and generous host, preferred the diet of the common people – coarse bread, whitebait, goat
cheese and dried figs – and, too impatient to wait for mealtimes, often snacked. Tiberius seemed to prefer wine to food, enjoyed fish but, as we have seen, did not like surprise deliveries.
Caligula gave exotic banquets, which the guests were sometimes too terrified to enjoy, but accepted payment for invitations. Claudius drank himself into a stupor every night and was fatally fond of
a particular mushroom. Nero was an extravagant gourmet and spent fortunes on jewelled crystal goblets.

Dormice in honey, peacocks’ tongues, garum, lolling, vomitoria and Petronius’ account of Trimalchio’s Feast – all of which, more anon – it was not only thus. The
food consumed by most Romans, most days, for hundreds of years was frugal, coarse and nasty. The excesses, fun and games and much quoted feasts and extraordinary dishes, were only
‘enjoyed’ by a few.

At the beginning, when Rome was a tiny Etruscan village with few resources or outlets, the
populus
ate figs, olives, oil, barley (with which they made porridge) and hard wheat (which they
ground to a paste). They drank goat’s and sheep’s milk
and made a simple cheese. But this village was on an important salt road where the locals exchanged their
few products for precious salt. Salt underpinned Rome’s position.

It took Romans 200 years to conquer all the various tribes who peopled the Italian peninsula and they didn’t have anything resembling bread till the sixth century after the founding of
Rome. André Simon says: ‘The Romans were greater eaters than the Greeks, but not such great talkers. They also loved feasts and banquets, large quantities of food and wine, rare,
exotic and costly fare which was sought more for the sake of ostentation than of its gastronomic excellence. It was not always thus: it might even be said that the greatness of Rome was built on
porridge and austerity.’ But austerity for the rich and ambitious was replaced by gluttony and swank, despite sumptuary laws, as the Roman armies conquered in Africa and in the East.

The three Punic Wars – the first 264–241
BC
and the last 149–146
BC
– secured for Rome a vast granary and useful
coastline. They ended up with all the Carthaginian territory – North Africa, Sicily (whence the best cooks), Corsica and Spain. They destroyed Carthage but they did not destroy her
wheatfields. Nor did they ignore the usefulness of the Phoenicians, Arabs from the Syrian coast, who were indeed the founders of Carthage; through the Phoenicians the early Romans learned about the
vines of Persia and the spoils of the East.

Ali Bab, the nineteenth-century French cookbook guru, is moved to quote Flaubert’s
Salomé
to illustrate the sort of feast the Romans would have learned about after their
successive conquests:

Flaubert wasn’t exaggerating, too much; it was initially from the Carthaginians that the Romans got the taste for huge, crazy meals.

Meanwhile, it was during the wars against Samnium, finally destroyed by Sulla, that the Romans became aware of real culinary skills; they came across the Greeks.

The Romans were never great sailors, so used the Phoenicians’ knowledge, trading skills and seafaring abilities
to widen their booty network. The Phoenicians sailed
to China, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka and brought back precious metals and spices – notably pepper, nutmeg, ginger, cardamom and cinnamon
(cassia).
The Romans got hold of
exotic birds like pheasants and flamingos; pretty fruits, like peaches, cherries, apricots and, most likely guavas, mangoes and quinces, as many Roman dishes seem to show a penchant for
‘sweet and sour’; and asparagus, since Pliny wrote that the asparagus from Ravenna each weighed a third of a pound, but remember that the Roman pound was and is only about thirteen
ounces. And before the introduction of the heavy asparagus, a forebear of the chunky white Italian, French and now Californian variety, the Romans called the tender tips of all green vegetables
asparagus.

As the Roman world expanded, so did the numbers of slaves, prisoners and itinerants who arrived in the city of Rome itself. The authorities had therefore to keep them fed, and quiet. The
annona
or grain and later bread dole was a fact of life and a topic of politics which obsessed Rome from about 200
BC
till the fourth century
AD
. Rome had been troubled by serious famines and shortages as far back as the sixth century
BC
; in 123
BC
Gaius Gracchus, seeing the
cost of living was staggeringly high, allowed all citizens to buy from public granaries at a hugely subsidized price; by 71
BC
, free grain was being dispensed to 40,000 male
citizens of Rome. In the decades that followed, the number of people receiving grain increased so greatly that Julius Caesar felt he had done terribly well to reduce the dole queue to a mere
150,000. Augustus let the queue creep up again to 320,000 – just under a third of the total estimated population of Rome. At one point food was so short that extravagance just had to be
curbed and the Fannian Law was introduced – according to this presumably impossible law, it was an offence to entertain
more than three guests to a meal apart from
members of the household; except on market days, when five guests were allowed. There were three market days per month. And the same law made it illegal to spend more than two drachmas and a half
on provisions, or to serve at any one meal more than one hen – unfattened (they got round this through castration).