The Classical World (66 page)

Very soon, there were to be some eloquent dodges too. Under the new laws, an engagement to marry was as effective as being married: men, therefore, were found to have betrothed themselves to baby girls whom they never intended to marry. As marriage could hasten or improve a man’s career, some men married just before canvassing for a position and then unmarried as soon as they had received it. Restrictions on bequests were evaded by leaving goods ‘on trust’ for friends or relations to pass on to named recipients. Legal texts show Augustus upholding the validity of these ‘trusts’ in another context, apparently without realizing that they could also be used to outwit his laws against childlessness.
¹⁰

The moral virtue of Roman citizens was also an old chestnut: it was a value rooted in past history, one which Augustus would take for granted. Here, he addressed all citizen-classes. Later in his reign, in 2
BC
and ad 4, he curbed excessive ‘manumission’ (freeing) of slaves and postponed full freedom for a slave until the age of thirty. He was not concerned here with a potential slave-shortage. Tens of thousands of slaves had been taken recently during his army’s wars in western Europe, with many more to come. More relevantly, some Roman slave-owners were said to be freeing slaves so that as citizens, they could claim the free corn-dole and live on it while still serving their masters as freedmen. Benefit fraud would certainly concern Augustus, but the main fear was that unworthy slaves were being given the cherished citizenship and that those who freed them were sometimes very young men, who were unable to tell good characters from bad. Once again, moral concern drove the reforms: these laws on ‘quality control’ persisted for the next five hundred years. Suggestively, the same year, ad 4/5, is the date of a ruling which defined the privileged
citizen-class in some, perhaps all, of the towns of Egypt. Here, too, Augustus may have imposed a clearer category of ‘respectable’ citizenship.

The conduct of existing citizens in Rome was also addressed. On festival days old-style processions were revived for the upper orders. Distinguished young men were encouraged to ride in complex formations and to enact the ‘old’ game, revived byJulius Caesar and supposedly derived from Troy, Rome’s parent city. Virgil’s
Aeneid
obligingly traces this game back to Aeneas’ funeral games for his dead father. Augustus celebrated this Troy Game ‘very often’, even in his new Forum, until falls and casualties obliged him to suspend it. He also revived the ancient yearly horse parade for those Roman knights who had the honour of a public horse. It was held on 15 July, but it too must have caused anxietyamong men whose skills on horseback were now quite often minimal.

There was also a stress on the moral improvement of the young. In Italian towns, Augustus encouraged local ‘colleges’ for young men in which they were to exercise, practise with weaponry and go hunting. At Rome, boys were not allowed out to watch games or shows by night without an adult attendant. In the city centre, Augustus is even said to have ordered all citizens to wear the woolly white toga. His own daughter and granddaughters were said to have been reintroduced to the old arts of weaving and spinning. Augustus was proud of his own toga, woven in the ancient fashion. Society women were quick, however, to cut away their matronly
stola
, give it shoulder straps and wear it invitingly just above their bosoms.

Senatorial families were particularly targeted. Sons of senators had to wear the special senatorial shoe and a patterned toga: they were expected, poor boys, to wear them to senatorial meetings where they now had to watch what dragged on, as future participants. They would be penalized, too, if they married unadvisedly. From 18
BC
onwards senators, their sons, grandsons and great-grandsons were to be heavily penalized if they married freedwomen, actresses or actresses’ children (the stage was an ignoble and promiscuous profession). Their female descendants were to be penalized if they married a freedman. Roman laws had never penalized marriages in general between free citizens and freedmen. Nor did Augustus, though he
showed his own social preference by refusing to have freedmen at his dinner table. What concerned him, rather, was his image as the upholder of senatorial dignity; hence he proposed these laws on senatorial marriages, and the ban on inferior wives or husbands marrying into this class.

However, there were ways round his obstacles. Instead of marrying, a senator could live with a freedwoman as his ‘concubine’, what we would call a partner. After the death of a first wife, such a ‘concubine’ was often preferable to the jealousies and insecurities of a second wife. Any citizen (not just a senator) was also to be penalized if he married somebody of ‘ill-repute’, a brothel-owner, pimp, actor or gladiator. Again, concubinage was the wayround, with the advantage that gifts could be made validlyto a concubine (but not to a wife) during a man’s lifetime. But the option was not open to men who found themselves promoted to the Senate when already married: they were rare cases, but if they had married beneath themselves, they would have to divorce and aim higher. Again, this element of quality control over newcomers may have been Augustus’ main concern.

The crowning law was a notorious law against adultery. Previously, adultery had been a private matter, to be settled by the husband or father within the Roman household. In 18
BC
Augustus made it a public crime, which was to be tried in court. The scope of this law is still disputed, but much of the detail is clear enough. The most extreme case was nicely considered. If a father caught his daughter and her boyfriend in the act on family premises, he could legally kill his daughter on the spot. The threat was more rhetorical than realistic. Only if the father killed his daughter could he then kill the adulterer too (‘adultery’ is derived from the Latin ‘to another person’,
ad alterum
, not from ‘adult behaviour’). Husbands’ right to kill was even more restricted. If the husband caught the couple, he could not kill his wife. He could only kill her boyfriend if the offender was of ill-repute. But he could corner the bounder for up to twenty hours to extract proof of guilt from him: it could have been quite an interview.

These extreme penalties were more hypothetical than an everyday reality. Much more importantly, the husband had to divorce his wife and prosecute her within sixty days if he had caught her in the act. Even so, without a head-on discovery, it might seem that couples could
agree to live privately with their affairs and do nothing. However, a third party could prosecute within another four months if no action was being taken, and the husband could be prosecuted too. The danger here was that an outsider, an angry relation perhaps, would start up a prosecution of one or the other’s lover and then try to extend it as if the ‘crime’ had been known all along and tolerated. Even slaves could be tortured to reveal intimate details. It was a particular danger because in some cases, husbands would have been condoning a wife’s affair so that they could take money or favours off her boyfriend in return. That sort of connivance was now made criminal. So was the aiding and abetting of adultery by providing a room, for instance, for the impatient couple. Similar penalties applied to men who had sex with a single woman of respectable status.

What was at stake here was not male fidelity. Like all ancient societies, Rome was highlystratified. If a man had sex with a slave-girl (or a slave-boy), a prostitute or a low-grade woman of infamy, he was not penalized at all. There was a ‘double standard’, one for men, and a stricter one for respectable women. Socially, this standard coexisted with a ‘double classification’: the lowest orders could still be penetrated without reprisals. In this light, we can make sense of Horace’s poetic presentation. His public poems are explicitly in favour of the curbs on adultery(the ‘staining sacrilege’
¹¹
) and the promotion of big families. But he is also the Horace with a taste for party-girls and women with fine Greek names. The context, here, is that these women are slave-girls and mistresses in a
demi-monde
. By the double classification, they are irrelevant to matters of sound Roman familymorality. Like Horace, Augustus himself had fancied a male sweetheart, evidently a boy of low servile status.
¹²

To modern liberal eyes, these laws are abominable. Husbands or wives convicted of adulterylost up to half their property (and part of the wife’s dowry) and were banished to an island. An adulterous wife was forbidden to remarry and, in general, the rules against widows and lovers made women’s lives even less at their own discretion. Yet they were not just Augustus’ idiosyncrasy. In classical Athens, after all, a husband could kill an adulterer caught in the act or humiliate him with notorious punishments (pushing a radish, penis-shaped, up his backside was an Athenian reprisal long before Romans prescribed
it). There was also scope in Athens for a third party to bring a prosecution for adultery: women found guilty were banned from participating in festivals and were liable to have their clothes ripped if they did so. We now execrate the Augustan laws, but we put the Athenians’ laws down to civic cohesion or fears about illegitimate citizens. The difference is that we know how, previously at Rome, this ‘offence’ had not been a public crime at all and that the change was hated, flouted and betrayed by those supposed to uphold it. Among the Athenians, it was not controversial. Among Romans, there was at least a context for it in recent public discourse, the sort of moralizing sounded by Cicero. He had expounded that ‘if the way of life of the nobles is altered, then the customarybehaviour of a state is changed’.
¹³
In 44
BC
his invective against Antony and Fulvia had publicized what sort of behaviour in households and marriages was totally unacceptable to all ‘good men and true’ and how it was a risk to the functioning of the community. Not everybody took this sort of rhetoric so seriously, but it had rested on ground which Augustus now occupied too.
¹⁴

Augustus’ successor, Tiberius, had the restraint of a true Roman aristocrat: while retaining Augustus’ laws, he tended to leave charges of adultery to be settled privately. In ad 19 it even emerged that a lady of good praetorian family, Vistilia, had registered herself as a prostitute in order to escape the laws altogether and continue to have her boyfriends with impunity: her aunt, by contrast, had dutifully married no less than six husbands in a row (probably, as each one died) and had given birth to seven children. Perhaps this Augustan good conduct made her niece so much more scandalous.
¹⁵
In the jaundiced view of the historian Tacitus, the law was simplymotivated by the financial gains which the Treasurywould make from its penalties. It was, he reasoned, part of the increased oppression of the laws, an aspect which had intensified under the emperors. Reported trials for adultery are quite rare in Tacitus’ histories, but the fact remains that the laws continued to be applied and clarified in connection with the ever-growing number of Roman citizens. In ad 190 more than 3,000 prosecutions for adulterywere found to be pending in Rome.
¹⁶
Legal texts confirm that Roman citizens in the provinces could be affected too.
¹⁷

Unlike Horace, the Augustan love-poets Propertius and Ovid represent the other side to the ‘crime’. They describe themselves as lovers of women who are married and not obviously from a shady
demimonde
. Ovid’s poems are more evasive, but give tips on how to pick up respectable women, while those of Propertius even dwell on the procuress, the depths of ill-repute.
¹⁸
Ovid’s witty poem, the
Art of Love
, appeared in a second edition, probably in 1
BC
, and if so, at a most inopportune moment. In the previous year, at the summit of his achievements, Augustus, the new ‘Father of the Fatherland’, had to face the fact that his own daughter Julia was guilty of flagrant adultery. It did not help that she said memorably that she only did it when pregnant: ‘I only invite another pilot when the ship is full.’
¹⁹
Those who go ‘back to basics’ are at risk to their own households: the discovery was followed byanother, that Augustus’ granddaughter was guilty of the same.

The vocal opposition, the evasions and the hypocrisy in high places give the Roman legislation a deservedlybad name. There was an irony to it all. If Antony had won, it would have been quite different. ‘Inimitable at sex’, he would have let others get on with it unimpeded. Dead, he could at least trust to his son. In 2
BC
it was this man, the young Iullus Antonius, who was held most to blame for the adultery with Augustus’ daughter.

Spectator Sports

Whether you win, whether you lose, we love you, Polidoxus (Renown)
.

Caption for the portrait of Renown, a race horse, on the
floor mosaic of Pompeianus at Cirta, in Algeria

Illustrious Fame used to sing of the lion laid low in the vast

valley of Nemea, the work of Heracles
.

Let ancient testimony be silent: after your shows, Caesar, we

have now seen this done by a woman’s hand
.

Martial,
On Spectacles
8 (on Titus’ show in the
Colosseum,
AD 80
)

Besides its buildings and its new regulations, Rome under Augustus and his successors is conspicuous in history for the scale of its public entertainments. Some of them set a fashion throughout the Empire; many of them connected with the emperor’s ‘care’ for the common people and the promotion of members of his family. They also challenged his views on morality, just as in other ways they still challenge ours.

The most civilized face of Augustan show business was the one which the Emperor Hadrian most favoured. It was the world of music and the theatre, the cultural invention of the Greeks. Italyhad had its own simple tradition of farce and drama, but Greek plays became much more popular, particularly from the second century
BC
onwards. They were accompanied by other Greek arts: recitations of episodes from Homer, mime-acting, the declaiming of particular myths and
ramatic scenes and, above all, pantomime-dancing. Pantomime was antiquity’s nearest equivalent to ballet. A silent dancer, wearing silk, performed challenging roles (Hercules in his madness being most difficult) while musicians and singers accompanied the rhythm and movement. Augustus adored the pantomime and popularized it at Rome, favouring a virtuoso dancer called Pylades who was the first to add a chorus and an orchestra.