A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors (3 page)

CURULE CHAIR
a grand stool made of ivory, sometimes inlaid with gold, for the use of magistrates and above, with curved legs in the shape of an X.

DELATOR
a citizen who denounced another, usually one of
substance, to ingratiate himself with the powers that be and get a
rake-off
(vide
MAIESTAS
).

DEMAGOGUE
rude word from the right for a politician of radical views who often hired thugs
(vide
Clodius and Milo).

DENARIUS
the origin of our penny (1d), a silver coin the size of a dime.

DIGNITAS
crucial to a Roman of any standing, his reputation, his worth, his everything. It was for the sake of his
dignitas
that Caesar crossed
the Rubicon.

ERGASTULA
barracks where slaves in chain-gangs working
latifundia
(landed estates) were locked up at night.

ETRUSCANS
were an older race than the Romans, who took over many of their beliefs. They lived in that swathe of Italy on the west, between the rivers
Arno and Tiber. Maecenas was an Etruscan prince.

FASCES
outward and visible sign of authority in Rome, these bunches of birch rods were borne before a magistrate by lictors, whose number indicated the
level of his power, from two for an
aedile
to twenty-four for a dictator. Outside the
pomerium
(boundary) of Rome an axe was included in the bundle, meaning the official could execute
as well as scourge . . .

FORUM
any open-air space where people congregated, also a market place.

FREEDMAN
a slave who had been given, or had purchased, his freedom, but see ‘
CLIENTELA
’.

FREE MAN
a man born free anywhere in the world.

GENS
(noun, fem.) clan in Rome – e.g., Julia, Claudia (this book is about the Julio-Claudian clan), Livia, Cornelia, etc.

GLADIATOR
a professional performer with the sword, who
fought before an audience, not intentionally to the death, several times
a year.

GOVERNOR
used loosely in this and other books on Roman history to mean consul,
praetor
or other official who ruled a province in the name of the
Senate or Emperor for a year or more.

GREECE
was never even a geographical expression in Roman times, being depopulated and politically
déclassé.
(The Athenian Empire
only lasted for thirty years.) Roman Emperors patronized, in every sense, the Greeks.

IMPERATOR
originally the commander of a Roman army, then a great general hailed for his victory by his army, then a title used only by Emperors.

IMPERIUM
area of power and degree of authority, vested in an individual and renewed annually.

INSULA
apartment building in Rome, where most people lived, separated from the next
insula
by a street or alley. A rich family might have the
whole of a ground floor of a five-storey building, the street-facing spaces being let as shops and the higher, the cheaper, the more dangerous and the most insanitary floors being subcontracted to
a slum landlord.

KNIGHTS
substantial Roman citizens, members of the equestrian order, who became in our period the businessmen of Rome – as opposed to the
patrician senators who were not supposed to be ‘in trade’. In the early days of the Republic the knights had to supply and maintain a horse as part of a unit of cavalry for the
city’s defence, but it became an indicator of status – 400,000
sesterces
a year – and political entitlement.

L
EGATES
the Roman army did not categorize ranks into as many grades as ours (from lieutenant to field-marshal); legates were senior officers at the
level of senator, reporting to the general and senior to military tribunes.

LEGION
the essential Roman army unit, akin in
esprit de corps,
tradition and reputation to our regiments but fixed at
around 6,000 men made up of ten cohorts of six centuries each. They were variously rowdy, riotous, rapist, indisciplined or balanced and trustworthy, depending. A legion was a complete unit, like a
modern division with its own artillery, auxiliaries and cavalry.

LEX
(noun, fem.), e.g., Lex Pompeia, called after the consul Pompey Strabo, passed by the Plebeian Assembly, which enfranchised communities in Cisalpine
Gaul. Laws were inscribed in bronze or stone and stored in the temple of Saturn.

LICTORS
the beadles, beefeaters, escorts of Roman magistrates who carried the
fasces
(q.v.). They had to be citizens but were not well paid and
relied on tips.

MAGISTRATES
general term for the elected officers of the Senate and People of Rome (SPQR –
Senatus Populusque Romanus
– still engraved on the manholes).

MAIESTAS
treason (cf.
lèse-majesté),
a dangerous and much abused law by Tiberius through to Nero in our period.

MANUMISSION
the act of freeing a slave. Theoretically the freedman became a Roman citizen but was usually too poor to vote as he was placed in one of
the unenfranchised classes.

MENTULA
correct Latin for male organ
(vide
PENIS
).

NOBLEMAN
as distinct from
PATRICIAN
(q.v.). A consul and his descendants became noblemen and this was a way of diluting the
exclusivity of the old aristocracy,
vide
the English custom of converting politicians into peers of the realm.

PATERFAMILIAS
head of the family, who in early Rome could execute his daughter if he smelt wine on her breath and sell his son into slavery. Augustus,
when pushed, availed himself of these ancient, terrible rights.

PATRICIANS
the early Roman aristocracy which adhered to its
prestige and privileges for hundreds of years, producing consuls,
praetors
, senators, generals and governors, whoever was in power. As in eighteenth-century England, when there were only 150 members of the House of Lords, they were all related and alone
could hold certain priesthoods; however, throughout our period their power is fading in the face of the ‘new men’ and the imperial freedman.

PENIS
(vulgar) name for the male organ
(vide
MENTULA
).

PLEBS
nothing derogatory about being plebeian, embraced every citizen who was not patrician.

POMERIUM
the religious boundary enclosing the city of Rome within which no one could be buried.

PONTEFIX MAXIMUS
head priest of the state religion; not a full-time job, but brought with it a grace and favour house with the Vestal Virgins.

PRAETOR
second highest job in the state, eight of them in our period, often provincial governors.

PROLITARII
the lowest, classes, also the ‘head count’.

PUBLICANI
‘publicans’ of the New Testament, tax farmers under the republic. The system generated abuse and was cleaned up by the
Emperors.

PUBLIC HORSE
in Rome (as in the Middle Ages) a horse cost as much as a Bentley; 1,800 were supplied by the state to the most important knights, becoming
a mark of distinction for a family, which handed them down through the generations.

QUAESTOR
the first step on the
cursus honorum,
a tax official who was elected for a year and had to be thirty, like a senator. There were sixteen
of them and they served in the treasury in Rome or were seconded to the provinces.

QUIRITES
a civilian as opposed to a soldier (cf. Julius Caesar’s opening remark to his disaffected veterans).

ROSTRA
prows of ships used for ramming but became our ‘rostrum’ because the prows of the defeated fleet of the Volsci
were stuck on to the speakers’ platform in the Forum.

SENATE
senior advisory and occasionally legislative and debating chamber in Rome, whose numbers wobbled up and down from 100 in the days of the kings to
300 in the Republic (when they were appointed by the Censors) to 600 under the Empire at the discretion of the Emperor. Senators had to be rich and were mainly landowners, often with estates all
over the Empire. They were often usurers and Brutus, ‘the noblest Roman of them all’, once took advantage of a thinly attended session to put through a guaranteed loan to some Cretans
at 48 per cent interest for himself. The Senate controlled the treasury, foreign affairs, declarations of war and could dominate in an emergency, even against an Emperor, e.g., in outlawing Nero.
Unlike its imitators in other countries, the Senate did not have its own building but could be convened in different places, like a privy council.

SESTERCES
abbreviated as HS, the commonest Roman currency, worth a quarter of a
denarius
.

SUBURA
the slummiest section of Rome, where nevertheless Caesar had his family
domus;
polyglot, including Jews and the first synagogue.

TALENT
about twenty-five kilos of metal not necessarily gold or silver.

TOGA
impressive but awkward garment worn by Roman citizens on formal occasions; like a large bath-sheet and held by the left hand. Colleen McCullough,
now a scholarly writer of historical novels, has proved that a Roman so attired could not have worn underpants as he would have found it impossible to pee. Togas only came in one size, were always
made of light wool but were decorated variously for Emperors, triumphant generals, magistrates, priests and for those in mourning – black.

TRIBE
thirty-five in number of which sixteen were ancient, patrician
gentes.

TRIBUNE
an official. The term was used of military officers, magistrates, senior civil servants at the treasury, elected representatives of the plebs
with powers of veto. Tribunicial
potestas
voted to Emperors gave them overriding powers.

TRIUMPH
voted by the Senate to a successful general; occasions when the city of Rome went
en fête,
wallowed in self-glorification, food,
drink, loot and the blood of their enemies. Often the preliminary to a
coup d’état;
Augustus restricted Triumphs and Nero, fatally, perverted them.

TUNIC
standard top for a Roman male, distinguished by stripes of colour according to rank. The
tunica modesta
was used to burn the Christians for
Nero’s garden parties.

VESTAL VIRGINS
six girls of gentle birth chosen as children of seven or eight to be brought up in chastity and serve the goddess Vesta for thirty years.
Their persons were sacrosanct and any lapse on their part was punished by being buried alive.

VILLA
a large country house, originally at the centre of an estate but in our period built in agreeable spots, like Antium, for pleasure and holidays by
the sea. They were always grand.

SEX

The omnipotent
paterfamilias,
enforcing chastity on his sons with the threat of death if they did not obey; the formidably pure matron, like the mother of the Gracchi;
the censorious Cato the Elder, who held that a husband had the right to kill a man found in his wife’s bed; all were part of Roman legend at the beginning of our age, the time of Augustus,
but their image had faded.

The DIY element in Roman justice had been replaced by the courts. The
matrona
Lucretia might blush in the presence of Brutus on being quoted an epigram of Martial, but she had her own
copy in the bedroom, and Cato was said to go to the theatre – smutty music-hall – only so that he could be seen to leave it.

The sexual temper of the age was randy, permissive and tolerant of fairly bad behaviour, but not vicious or orgiastic. The sources for this opinion – the poets Horace, Virgil and Ovid, the
writers Martial, Petronius and Juvenal, the historians Tacitus, Suetonius and Dio and, somewhat surprisingly, Cicero, from his lawyer’s addresses and his letters – used by modern
scholars, with your author limping behind, describe every variety of sexual activity, but contain no reference to group sex –
partouses.