cumbrous carriages of the wealthy, which began to traverse them with the pomp and circumstance of our own aristocratic vehicles of a century since ;1 while the police of the city seems never to have contemplated the removal of the most obvious causes of crowd and obstruction, in the exhibition of gymnastic and gladiatorial spectacles, of conjurors' tricks and the buffoonery of the lowest class of stage-players, in the centre of the most frequented thoroughfares.

The noble never crossed his threshold without a numerous train of clients and retainers; the lower people congregated at the corners of the streets to hear the gossip of the day and discuss the merits of racers and dancers; the slaves hovered over the steam of the open cookshops, or loitered, on their masters' errands, to gaze on the rude drawings or pore over the placards on the walls. The last century had filled the imperial capital with multitudes of foreigners, attracted from curiosity as much as from motives of business to the renowned emporium of the wonders of the world, who added to the number of idlers and loungers in the streets of Rome; men of strange costumes and figures and, when they spoke, of speech still stranger, who, while they gazed around them with awe and admiration, became themselves each a centre of remark to a crowd of wondering citizens. The marked though casual manner in which the throng of the streets is noticed by the Roman writers, shows, in the strongest way, how ordinary a feature it was of life in the city.

The streets, or rather the narrow and winding alleys, of Rome were miserably inadequate to the circulation of the people who thus moved along or thronged them; for the vici were no better than lanes or alleys, and there were only two viæ, or paved ways, fit for the transport of heavy carriages, the Sacra and the Nova, in the central parts of the city. The three interior hills, the Palatine, the Aventine, and the Capitoline, were sore impediments to traffic; for no carriages could pass over them, and it may be doubted whether they were even thoroughfares for foot passengers. The occurrence, not unusual, of a fire or an inundation, or the casual fall of a house, must have choked the circulation of the life-blood of the city. The first, indeed, and the last of these, were accidents to which every place of human resort is liable; but the inundations of Rome were a marked and peculiar feature of her ancient existence.

Augustus, with far-seeing economic sagacity, was anxious to employ all men of rank and breeding in practical business, while at the same time he proposed to them his own example as a follower both of the Muses and the Graces. The Roman noble rose ordinarily at daybreak, and received at his levée the crowd of clients and retainers who had thronged the steps before his yet closed door from the hours of darkness. A few words of greeting were expected on either side, and then, as the sun mounted the eastern sky, he descended from his elevated mansion into the Forum. He might walk surrounded by the still lingering crowd, or he might be carried in a litter; but to ride in a wheeled vehicle on such occasions was no Roman fashion.2 Once arrived in the Forum, he was quickly immersed in the

1 The Appian way was the fashionable drive of the Roman nobility.

2 The Romans rode in carriages on a journey, but rarely for amusement, and never within the city. Even beyond the wall it was considered disreputable to hold the reins one's self, such being the occupation of the slave or hired driver. Juvenal ranks the consul, who creeps out at night to drive his own chariot, with the most degraded of characters: that he should venture to drive by daylight, while still in office, is an excess of turpitude transcending the imagination of the most sarcastic painter of manners as they were. And this was a hundred years later than the age of Augustus. See Juvenal, VIII, 145.

business of the day. He presided as a judge in one of the basilicas, or he appeared himself before the judges as an advocate, a witness, or a suitor. He transacted his private affairs with his banker or notary; he perused. the public journal of yesterday, and inquired how his friend's cause had sped before the tribunal of the prætor. At every step he crossed the path of some of the notables of his own class, and the news of the day and interests of the hour were discussed between them with dignified politeness.

Such were the morning occupations of a dies fastus, or working day: the holy day had its appropriate occupation in attendance upon the temple services, in offering a prayer for the safety of the emperor and people, in sprinkling frankincense on the altar, and, on occasions of special devotion, appeasing the gods with a sacrifice. But all transactions of business, secular or divine, ceased at once when the voice of the herald on the steps of the Hostilian Curia proclaimed that the shadow of the sun had passed the line on the pavement before him, which marked the hour of midday. Every door was now closed; every citizen, at least in summer, plunged into the dark recesses of his sleeping chamber for the enjoyment of his meridian slumber. The midday siesta terminated, generally speaking, the affairs of the day,

and every
man was now released from duty and free to devote himself, on
rising again, to relaxation or amusement till the return of night. If the
senate had been used sometimes to prolong or renew its sittings, there was
a rule that after the tenth hour, or four o'clock, no new business could be
brought under its notice, and we are told of Asinius Pollio that he would
not even open a letter after that hour.

Meanwhile Rome had risen again to amuse and recreate itself, and the grave man of business had his amusements as well as the idler of the Forum. The exercises of the Field of Mars were the relaxation of the soldiers of the republic; and when the urban populace had withdrawn itself from military service, the traditions of the Campus were still cherished by the upper ranks, and the practice of its mimic war confined, perhaps, exclusively to them. The swimming, running, riding, and javelin-throwing of this public ground became under the emperors a fashion of the nobility: the populace had no taste for such labours, and witnessed perhaps with some surprise the toils to which men voluntarily devoted themselves who possessed slaves to relieve them from the most ordinary exertions of the day. But the young competitors in these athletic contests were not without a throng of spectators: the porticoes which bordered the field were crowded with the elder people and

H. W.-VOL. VI. Z

the women, who shunned the heat of the declining sun; many a private dwelling looked upon it from the opposite side of the river, which was esteemed on that account a desirable place of residence. Augustus had promised his favour to every revival of the gallant customs of antiquity, and all the Roman world that lived in his smiles hastened to the scene of these ancient amusements to gratify the emperor, if not to amuse themselves.

The ancients, it was said, had made choice of the Field of Mars for the scene of their mimic warfare for the convenience of the stream of the Tiber, in which the weary combatants might wash off the sweat and dust, and return to their companions in the full glow of recruited health and vigour. But the youth of Rome in more refined days were not satisfied with these genial ablutions. They resorted to warm and vapour-baths, to the use of perfumes to enhance the luxury of refreshment.

The Romans had, indeed, a universal and extraordinary fondness for the bath, which degenerated in their immoderate use of it into a voluptuous and enervating luxury. The houses of the opulent were always furnished with chambers for this purpose; they had their warm and cold baths as well as their steam apparatus, and the application of oil and perfumes was equally universal among them. From the earliest times there were perhaps places of more general resort, where the plebeian paid a trifling sum for the enjoyment of this luxury; and among other ways of courting popu

Ew Barker

ROMAN BATH IMPLEMENTS

lar favour was that of subsidising the owners of these common baths, and giving the people the free use of them for one or more days. Agrippa carried this mode of popular bribery to excess. Besides the erection of lesser baths to the number of 170, he was the first to construct public establishments of the kind, or thermæ, in which the citizens might assemble in large numbers, and combine the pleasure of purification with the exercise of gymnastic sports; while at the same time their tastes might be cultivated by the contemplation of paintings and sculptures, and by listening to song and music.

The Roman, however, had his peculiar notion of personal dignity, and it was not without a feeling of uneasiness that he stripped himself in public below the waist, however accustomed he might be to exhibit his chest and shoulders in the performance of his manly exercises. The baths of Mæcenas and Agrippa remained without rivals for more than one generation, though they were ultimately supplanted by imperial constructions on a far more extensive scale. In the time of Augustus the resort of women to the public baths was forbidden, if indeed such an indecorum had yet been imagined. At a later period, whatever might be the absence of costume among the men, the women at least were partially covered. An ingenious writer has remarked on the effect produced on the spirits by the action of air and water upon the naked body. The unusual lightness and coolness, the disembarrassment of the limbs, the elasticity of the circulation, com

bine to stimulate the sensibility of the nervous system. Hence the therma of the great city resounded with the shouts and laughter of the bathers, who, when emerged from the water and resigned to the manipulations of the barbers and perfumers, gazed with voluptuous languor on the brilliant decorations of the halls around them, or listened with charmed ears to the singers and musicians, and even to the poets who presumed upon their helplessness to recite to them their choicest compositions.

SUPPERS AND BANQUETS

The bath was a preparation for the cæna or supper, which deserves to be described as a national institution; it had from the first its prescriptions and traditions, its laws and usages; it was sanctified by religious observances, and its whole system of etiquette was held as binding as if it had had a religious significance. Under the protection of the gods to whom they poured their libations, friends met together for the recreation equally of mind and body. If the conversation flagged, it was relieved by the aid of minstrels, who recited the gallant deeds of the national heroes; but in the best days of the republic the guests of the noble Roman were men of speech not less than of deeds, men instructed in all the knowledge of their times, and there was more room to fear lest their converse should degenerate into the argumentative and didactic than languish from the want of matter or interest.

It is probable, however, that the table talk of the higher classes at Rome was peculiarly terse and epigrammatic. Many specimens have been preserved to us of the dry, sententious style which they seem to have cultivated; their remarks on life and manners were commonly conveyed in solemn or caustic aphorisms, and they condemned as undignified and Greekish any superfluous abundance in the use of words. The graceful and flowing conversations of Cicero's dialogues were imitated from Athenian writings, rather than drawn after the types of actual life around him. "People at supper," said Varro, himself not the least sententious of his nation, "should neither be loquacious nor mute; eloquence is for the Forum, silence for the bed chamber." Another rule of the same master of etiquette, that the number of the guests should not exceed nine, the number of the Muses, nor fall short of three, the number of the Graces, was dictated by a sense of the decorous proprieties of the Roman banquet, which the love of ostentation and pride of wealth were now constantly violating.

Luxury and the appetite for excitement were engaged in multiplying occasions of more than ordinary festivity, on which the most rigid of the sumptuary laws allowed a wider license to the expenses of the table. On such high days the numbers of the guests were limited neither by law nor custom; the entertainer, the master or father, as he was called, of the supper, was required to abdicate the ordinary functions of host, and, according to the Greek custom, a king of the wine or arbiter of the drinking, was chosen from among themselves by lot, or for his convivial qualities, by the bacchanalian crew around him.

Our own more polished but not unmanly taste must look with amazement and even disgust at the convivial excesses of the Romans at this period, such as they have themselves represented them to us. Their luxury was a coarse and low imitation of Greek voluptuousness; and for nothing perhaps did the Greeks more despise their rude conquerors than for the manifest failure of their attempts at imitating the vices of their betters.

The Romans vied with one another in the cost rather than the elegance of their banquets, and accumulated with absurd pride the rarest and most expensive viands on their boards, to excite the admiration of their parasites, not to gratify their palates. Cleopatra's famous conceit, in dissolving the pearl in vinegar, may have been the fine satire of an elegant Grecian upon the tasteless extravagance of her barbarian lover. Antony, indeed, though he degraded himself to the manners of a gladiator, was a man of noble birth, and might have imbibed purer tastes at the tables of the men of his own class; but the establishment of the imperial régime thrust into the high places of society a number of low-born upstarts, the sons of the speculators and contractors of the preceding generation, who knew not how to dispense with grace the unbounded wealth their sires had accumulated.

Augustus would fain have restrained these excesses, which shamed the dignified reserve which he wished to characterise the imperial court; he exerted himself by counsel and example, as well as by formal enactments, to educate his people in the simpler tastes of the older time, refined but not yet enervated by the infusion of Hellenic culture. His laws, indeed, shared the fate of the sumptuary regulations of his predecessors, and soon passed from

neglect into oblivion. His example was too austere, perhaps, to be generally followed even by the most sedulous of his own courtiers. He ate but little, and was content with the simplest fare: his bread was of the second quality, at a time when the best was far less fine than ours; and he was satisfied with dining on a few small fishes, curds or cheese, figs and dates, taken at any hour when he had an appetite rather than at regular and formal meals. He was careful, however, to keep a moderately furnished table for his associates, at which he commonly appeared himself, though he was often the last to arrive, and the first to retire from it.

The ordinary arrangement of a Roman supper consisted of three low couches, disposed, horse-shoe fashion, before a low table, at which the attendant slaves could minister without incommoding the recumbent guests. Upon each couch three persons reclined, a mode which had been introduced from Greece, where it had been in use for centuries, though not from heroic times. The Egyptians and Persians sat at meat; so, till the Greeks corrupted them, did also the Jews; the poetical traditions of Hellas represented the gods as sitting at their celestial banquets. The Macedonians also, down to the time of Alexander, are said to have adopted the more ordinary practice; and such was the custom at Rome till a late period. When the men first

1 The leges Julia allowed two hundred sesterces for a repast on ordinary days, three hundred on holidays, one thousand for special occasions, such as a wedding, etc. Gellius d II, 24.