The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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92. IV. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts
93. V. XI. Other Magistracies and Attributions
94. We are not expressly informed from whom the Latin rights of
the non-colonized townships of this region and especially of
Nemausus proceeded. But as Caesar himself (B. C. i. 35) virtually
states that Nemausus up to 705 was a Massiliot village; as
according to Livy's account (Dio, xli. 25; Flor. ii. 13; Oros. vi.
15) this very portion of territory was taken from the Massiliots by
Caesar; and lastly as even on pre-Augustan coins and then in Strabo
the town appears as a community of Latin rights, Caesar alone can
have been the author of this bestowal of Latinity. As to Ruscino
(Roussillon near Perpignan) and other communities in Narbonese Gaul
which early attained a Latin urban constitution, we can only
conjecture that they received it contemporarily with Nemausus.
95. V. VII. Indulgence toward Existing Arrangements
96. II. V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League
97. V. X. The Leaders of the Republicans Put to Death
98. That no community of full burgesses had more than limited
jurisdiction, is certain. But the fact, which is distinctly
apparent from the Caesarian municipal ordinance for Cisalpine Gaul,
is a surprising one--that the processes lying beyond municipal
competency from this province went not before its governor, but
before the Roman praetor; for in other cases the governor is in his
province quite as much representative of the praetor who
administers justice between burgesses as of the praetor who
administers justice between burgess and non-burgess, and is
thoroughly competent to determine all processes. Beyond doubt this
is a remnant of the arrangement before Sulla, under which in
the whole continental territory as far as the Alps the urban
magistrates alone were competent, and thus all the processes there,
where they exceeded municipal competency, necessarily came before
the praetors in Rome. In Narbo again, Gades, Carthage, Corinth,
the processes in such a case went certainly to the governor
concerned; as indeed even from practical considerations
the carrying of a suit to Rome could not well be thought of.
99. It is difficult to see why the bestowal of the Roman franchise
on a province collectively, and the continuance of a provincial
administration for it, should be usually conceived as contrasts
excluding each other. Besides, Cisalpine Gaul notoriously obtained
the -civitas- by the Roscian decree of the people of the 11th March
705, while it remained a province as long as Caesar lived and was
only united with Italy after his death (Dio, xlviii. 12);
the governors also can be pointed out down to 711. The very fact that
the Caesarian municipal ordinance never designates the country as
Italy, but as Cisalpine Gaul, ought to have led to the right view.
100. IV. II. The First Sicilian Slave War
101. The continued subsistence of the municipal census-authorities
speaks for the view, that the local holding of the census had
already been established for Italy in consequence of the Social war
(Staatsrecht, ii. 8 368); but probably the carrying out of this
system was Caesar's work.
102. II. VII. Intermediate Fuctionaries, III. III. Autonomy
103. III. XI. Supervision of the Senate Over the Provinces
and Their Governors
104. I. XI. Character of the Roman Law
105. IV. XIII. Philology
106. I. XI. Clients and Foreigners
107. V. XI. Usury Laws
108. V. V. Transpadanes
109. I. XIV. Italian Measures ff.
110. III. XII. Coins and Moneys
111. Weights recently brought to light at Pompeii suggest
the hypothesis that at the commencement of the imperial period
alongside of the Roman pound the Attic mina (presumably in
the ratio of 3: 4) passed current as a second imperial weight
(Hermes, xvi. 311).
112. The gold pieces, which Sulla (iv. 179) and contemporarily
Pompeius caused to be struck, both in small quantity, do not
invalidate this proposition; for they probably came to be taken
solely by weight just like the golden Phillippei which were in
circulation even down to Caesar's time. They are certainly
remarkable, because they anticipate the Caesarian imperial gold
just as Sulla's regency anticipated the new monarchy.
113. IV. XI. Token-Money
114. It appears, namely, that in earlier times the claims of
the state-creditors payable in silver could not be paid against their
will in gold according to its legal ratio to silver; whereas it
admits of no doubt, that from Caesar's time the gold piece had to
be taken as a valid tender for 100 silver sesterces. This was just
at that time the more important, as in consequence of the great
quantities of gold put into circulation by Caesar it stood for
a time in the currency of trade 25 per cent below the legal ratio.
115. There is probably no inscription of the Imperial period,
which specifies sums of money otherwise than in Roman coin.
116. Thus the Attic -drachma-, although sensibly heavier than
the -denarius-, was yet reckoned equal to it; the -tetradrachmon- of
Antioch, weighing on an average 15 grammes of silver, was made
equal to 3 Roman -denarii-, which only weigh about 12 grammes;
the -cistophorus- of Asia Minor was according to the value of silver
above 3, according to the legal tariff =2 1/2 -denarii-; the Rhodian
half -drachma- according to the value of silver=3/4, according to
the legal tariff = 5/8 of a -denarius-, and so on.
117. III. III. Illyrian Piracy
118. The identity of this edict drawn up perhaps by Marcus Flavius
(Macrob. Sat. i. 14, 2) and the alleged treatise of Caesar, De
Stellis, is shown by the joke of Cicero (Plutarch, Caes. 59) that
now the Lyre rises according to edict.
We may add that it was known even before Caesar that the solar year
of 365 days 6 hours, which was the basis of the Egyptian calendar,
and which he made the basis of his, was somewhat too long.
the most exact calculation of the tropical year which the ancient world
was acquainted with, that of Hipparchus, put it at 365 d. 5 h. 52'
12"; the true length is 365 d. 5 h. 48' 48".
119. Caesar stayed in Rome in April and Dec. 705, on each occasion
for a few days; from Sept. to Dec. 707; some four months in the autumn
of the year of fifteen months 708, and from Oct. 709 to March 710.
Notes for Chapter XII
1. V. VIII. Clodius
2. III. XIV. Cato's Encyclopedia
3. These form, as is well known, the so-called seven liberal arts,
which, with this distinction between the three branches of
discipline earlier naturalized in Italy and the four subsequently
received, maintained their position throughout the middle ages.
4. IV. XII. Latin Instruction
5. Thus Varro (De R. R. i. 2) says: -ab aeditimo, ut dicere
didicimus a patribus nostris; ut corrigimur ab recenlibus
urbanis, ab aedituo-.
6. The dedication of the poetical description of the earth which
passes under the name of Scymnus is remarkable in reference to
those relations. After the poet has declared his purpose of
preparing in the favourite Menandrian measure a sketch of geography
intelligible for scholars and easy to be learned by heart, he
dedicates--as Apollodorus dedicated his similar historical
compendium to Attalus Philadelphus king of Pergamus
--athanaton aponemonta dexan Attalo
teis pragmateias epigraphein eileiphoti-- --
his manual to Nicomedes III king (663?-679) of Bithynia:
--ego d' akouon, dioti ton non basileon
monos basilikein chreistoteita prosphereis
peiran epethumeis autos ep' emautou labein
kai paragenesthai kai ti basileus est' idein,
dio tei prothesei sumboulon exelexamein
... ton Apollena ton Didumei...
ou dei schedon malista kai pepeismenos
pros sein kata logon eika (koinein gar schedon
tois philomathousin anadedeichas) estian--.
7. IV. XIII. Historical Composition
8. V. XII. Greek Instruction
9. Cicero testifies that the mime in his time had taken the place
of the Atellana (Ad Fam. ix. 16); with this accords the fact, that
the -mimi- and -mimae- first appear about the Sullan epoch (Ad Her.
i. 14, 24; ii. 13, 19; Atta Fr. 1 Ribbeck; Plin. H. N. vii. 43,
158; Plutarch, Sull. 2, 36). The designation -mimus-, however, is
sometimes inaccurately applied to the comedian generally. Thus
the -mimus- who appeared at the festival of Apollo in 542-543 (Festus
under -salva res est-; comp. Cicero, De Orat. ii. 59, 242) was
evidently nothing but an actor of the -palliata-, for there was at
this period no room in the development of the Roman theatre for
real mimes in the later sense.
With the mimus of the classical Greek period--prose dialogues,
in which -genre- pictures, particularly of a rural kind, were
presented--the Roman mimus had no especial relation.
10. With the possession of this sum, which constituted
the qualification for the first voting-class and subjected
the inheritance to the Voconian law, the boundary line was crossed
which separated the men of slender means (-tenuiores-) from
respectable people. Therefore the poor client of Catullus
(xxiii. 26) beseeches the gods to help him to this fortune.
11. In the "Descensus ad Inferos" of Laberius all sorts of people
come forward, who have seen wonders and signs; to one there
appeared a husband with two wives, whereupon a neighbour is of
opinion that this is still worse than the vision, recently seen by
a soothsayer in a dream, of six aediles. Caesar forsooth desired--
according to the talk of the time--to introduce polygamy in Rome
(Suetonius, Caes. 82) and he nominated in reality six aediles
instead of four. One sees from this that aberius understood
how to exercise the fool's privilege and Caesar how to permit
the fool's freedom.
12. V. VIII. Attempts of the Regents to Check It
13. V. XI. The Poor
14. IV. XIII. Dramatic Arrangements
15. He obtained from the state for every day on which he acted
1000 -denarii- (40 pounds) and besides this the pay for his
company. In later years he declined the honorarium for himself.
16. Such an individual apparent exception as Panchaea the land of
incense (ii. 417) is to be explained from the circumstance that
this had passed from the romance of the Travels of Euhemerus
already perhaps into the poetry of Ennius, at any rate into
the poems of Lucius Manlius (iv. 242; Plin. H. N. x. a, 4) and thence
was well known to the public for which Lucretius wrote.
17. III. XIV. Moral Effect of Tragedy
18. This naively appears in the descriptions of war, in which
the seastorms that destroy armies, and the hosts of elephants that
trample down those who are on their own side--pictures, that is,
from the Punic wars--appear as if they belong to the immediate
present. Comp. ii. 41; v. 1226, 1303, 1339.
19. "No doubt," says Cicero (Tusc. iii. 19, 45) in reference to
Ennius, "the glorious poet is despised by our reciters of
Euphorion." "I have safely arrived," he writes to Atticus (vii. 2
init.), "as a most favourable north wind blew for us across from
Epirus. This spondaic line you may, if you choose, sell to one of
the new-fashioned poets as your own" (-ita belle nobis flavit ab
Epiro lenissumus Onchesmites. Hunc- --spondeiazonta-- -si cui voles
--ton neoteron-- pro tuo vendito-).
20. V. VIII. Literature of the Opposition
21. "For me when a boy," he somewhere says, "there sufficed
a single rough coat and a single under-garment, shoes without
stockings, a horse without a saddle; I had no daily warm bath, and
but seldom a river-bath." On account of his personal valour he
obtained in the Piratic war, where he commanded a division of
the fleet, the naval crown.
22. V. X. The Pompeians in Spain
23. There is hardly anything more childish than Varro's scheme of
all the philosophies, which in the first place summarily declares
all systems that do not propose the happiness of man as their
ultimate aim to be nonexistent, and then reckons the number of
philosophies conceivable under this supposition as two hundred and
eighty-eight. The vigorous man was unfortunately too much a scholar
to confess that he neither could nor would be a philosopher,
and accordingly as such throughout life he performed a blind dance-
not altogether becoming--between the Stoa, Pythagoreanism, and Diogenism.
24. On one occasion he writes, "-Quintiforis Clodii foria ac
poemata ejus gargaridians dices; O fortuna, O fors fortuna-!" And
elsewhere, "-Cum Quintipor Clodius tot comoedias sine ulla fecerit
Musa, ego unum libellum non 'edolem' ut ait Ennius?-" This not
otherwise known Clodius must have been in all probability
a wretched imitator of Terence, as those words sarcastically laid
at his door "O fortuna, O fors fortuna!" are found occurring
in a Terentian comedy.
The following description of himself by a poet in Varro's
--Onos Louras--,
-Pacuvi discipulus dicor, porro is fuit Enni,
Ennius Musarum; Pompilius clueor-
might aptly parody the introduction of Lucretius (p. 474), to whom
Varro as a declared enemy of the Epicurean system cannot have been
well disposed, and whom he never quotes.
25. He himself once aptly says, that he had no special fondness
for antiquated words, but frequently used them, and that he was
very fond of poetical words, but did not use them.
26. The following description is taken from the -Marcipor-
("Slave of Marcus"):--
-Repente noctis circiter meridie
Cum pictus aer fervidis late ignibus
Caeli chorean astricen ostenderet,
Nubes aquali, frigido velo leves
Caeli cavernas aureas subduxerant,
Aquam vomentes inferam mortalibus.
Ventique frigido se ab axe eruperant,
Phrenetici septentrionum filii,
Secum ferentes tegulas, ramos, syrus.
At nos caduci, naufragi, ut ciconiae
Quarum bipennis fulminis plumas vapor
Perussit, alte maesti in terram cecidimus-.
In the --'Anthropopolis-- we find the lines:
-Non fit thesauris, non auro pectu' solutum;
Non demunt animis curas ac relligiones
Persarum montes, non atria diviti' Crassi-.
But the poet was successful also in a lighter vein. In the -Est
Modus Matulae- there stood the following elegant commendation of
wine:--
-Vino nihil iucundius quisquam bibit.
Hoc aegritudinem ad medendam invenerunt,
Hoc hilaritatis dulce seminarium.
Hoc continet coagulum convivia-.
And in the --Kosmotonounei-- the wanderer returning home thus
concludes his address to the sailors:
-Delis habenas animae leni,
Dum nos ventus flamine sudo
Suavem ad patriam perducit-.
27. The sketches of Varro have so uncommon historical
and even poetical significance, and are yet, in consequence of
the fragmentary shape in which information regarding them has reached
us, known to so few and so irksome to study, that we may be allowed
to give in this place a resume of some of them with the few
restorations indispensable for making them readable.
The satire Manius (Early Up!) describes the management of a rural
household. "Manius summons his people to rise with the sun, and in
person conducts them to the scene of their work. The youths make
their own bed, which labour renders soft to them, and supply
themselves with water-jar and lamp. Their drink is the clear fresh
spring, their fare bread, and onions as relish. Everything
prospers in house and field. The house is no work of art; but
an architect might learn symmetry from it. Care is taken of
the field, that it shall not be left disorderly and waste, or go to
ruin through slovenliness and neglect; in return the grateful Ceres
wards off damage from the produce, that the high-piled sheaves may
gladden the heart of the husbandman. Here hospitality still holds
good; every one who has but imbibed mother's milk is welcome.
the bread-pantry and wine-vat and the store of sausages on the rafters,
lock and key are at the service of the traveller, and piles of food
are set before him; contented sits the sated guest, looking neither
before nor behind, dozing by the hearth in the kitchen.
the warmest double-wool sheepskin is spread as a couch for him.
"Here people still as good burgesses obey the righteous law, which
neither out of envy injures the innocent, nor out of favour pardons
the guilty. Here they speak no evil against their neighbours.
Here they trespass not with their feet on the sacred hearth, but
honour the gods with devotion and with sacrifices, throw for
the house-spirit his little bit of flesh into his appointed little
dish, and when the master of the household dies, accompany the bier
with the same prayer with which those of his father and of his
grandfather were borne forth."
In another satire there appears a "Teacher of the Old"
(--Gerontodidaskalos--), of whom the degenerate age seems to stand
more urgently in need than of the teacher of youth, and he explains
how "once everything in Rome was chaste and pious," and now all
things are so entirely changed. "Do my eyes deceive me, or do I
see slaves in arms against their masters?--Formerly every one who
did not present himself for the levy, was sold on the part of
the state into slavery abroad; now the censor who allows cowardice and
everything to pass is called [by the aristocracy, III. XI. Separation
Of the Orders in the Theatre; IV. X. Shelving of the Censorship, V. III.
Renewal of the Censorship; V. VIII. Humiliations of the Republicans]
a great citizen, and earns praise because he does not seek
to make himself a name by annoying his fellow-citizens.--
Formerly the Roman husbandman had his beard shaven once every week;
now the rural slave cannot have it fine enough.--Formerly one saw
on the estates a corn-granary, which held ten harvests, spacious
cellars for the wine-vats and corresponding wine-presses; now
the master keeps flocks of peacocks, and causes his doors to be inlaid
with African cypress-wood.--Formerly the housewife turned
the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot on
the hearth in her eye, that the pottage might not be singed; now," it
is said in another satire, "the daughter begs her father for
a pound of precious stones, and the wife her husband for a bushel of
pearls.--Formerly a newly-married husband was silent and bashful;
now the wife surrenders herself to the first coachman that comes.--
Formerly the blessing of children was woman's pride; now if her
husband desires for himseli children, she replies: Knowest thou not
what Ennius says?
"'-Ter sub armis malim vitam cernere Quam semel modo parere--.--'
"Formerly the wife was quite content, when the husband once or twice
in the year gave her a trip to the country in the uncushioned
waggon;" now, he could add (comp. Cicero, Pro Mil. 21, 55), "the
wife sulks if her husband goes to his country estate without her,
and the travelling lady is attended to the villa by the fashionable
host of Greek menials and the choir." --In a treatise of a graver
kind, "Catus or the Training of Children," Varro not only instructs
the friend who had asked him for advice on that point, regarding
the gods who were according to old usage to be sacrificed to for
the children's welfare, but, referring to the more judicious mode
of rearing children among the Persians and to his own strictly
spent youth, he warns against over-feeding and over-sleeping,
against sweet bread and fine fare--the whelps, the old man thinks,
are now fed more judiciously than the children--and likewise
against the enchantresses' charms and blessings, which in cases of
sickness so often take the place of the physician's counsel. He
advises to keep the girls at embroidery, that they may afterwards
understand how to judge properly of embroidered and textile work,
and not to allow them to put off the child's dress too early; he
warns against carrying boys to the gladiatorial games, in which
the heart is early hardened and cruelty learned.--In the "Man of Sixty
Years" Varro appears as a Roman Epimenides who had fallen asleep
when a boy of ten and waked up again after half a century. He is
astonished to find instead of his smooth-shorn boy's head an old
bald pate with an ugly snout and savage bristles like a hedgehog;
but he is still more astonished at the change in Rome. Lucrine
oysters, formerly a wedding dish, are now everyday fare; for which,
accordingly, the bankrupt glutton silently prepares the incendiary
torch. While formerly the father disposed of his boy, now
the disposal is transferred to the latter: he disposes, forsooth, of
his father by poison. The Comitium had become an exchange,
the criminal trial a mine of gold for the jurymen. No law is any
longer obeyed save only this one, that nothing is given for
nothing. All virtues have vanished; in their stead the awakened
man is saluted by impiety, perfidy, lewdness, as new denizens.
"Alas for thee, Marcus, with such a sleep and such an awakening!"--
The sketch resembles the Catilinarian epoch, shortly after which
(about 697) the old man must have written it, and there lay a truth
in the bitter turn at the close; where Marcus, properly reproved
for his unseasonable accusations and antiquarian reminiscences, is--
with a mock application of a primitive Roman custom--dragged as
a useless old man to the bridge and thrown into the Tiber. There was
certainly no longer room for such men in Rome.
28. "The innocent," so ran a speech, "thou draggest forth,
trembling in every limb, and on the high margin of the river's bank
in the dawn of the morning" [thou causest them to be slaughtered].
Several such phrases, that might be inserted without difficulty in
a commonplace novel, occur.
29. V. XII. Poems in Prose
30. V. XII. Catullus
31. V. XII. Greek Literati in Rome
32. That the treatise on the Gallic war was published all at once,
has been long conjectured; the distinct proof that it was so, is
furnished by the mention of the equalization of the Boii and
the Haedui already in the first book (c. 28) whereas the Boii still
occur in the seventh (c. 10) as tributary subjects of the Haedui,
and evidently only obtained equal rights with their former masters
on account of their conduct and that of the Haedui in the war
against Vercingetorix. On the other hand any one who attentively
follows the history of the time will find in the expression as to
the Milonian crisis (vii. 6) a proof that the treatise was published
before the outbreak of the civil war; not because Pompeius is there
praised, but because Caesar there approves the exceptional laws of
702.(p. 146) This he might and could not but do, so long as he
sought to bring about a peaceful accommodation with Pompeius,( p.
175) but not after the rupture, when he reversed the condemnations
that took place on the basis of those laws injurious for him.(p.
316) Accordingly the publication of this treatise has been quite
rightly placed in 703.
The tendency of the work we discern most distinctly in
the constant, often--most decidedly, doubtless, in the case of the
Aquitanian expedition (III. XI. The Censorship A Prop of the Nobility)--
not successful, justification of every single act of war as
a defensive measure which the state of things had rendered inevitable.
That the adversaries of Caesar censured his attacks on the Celts
and Germans above all as unprovoked, is well known (Sueton. Caes. 24).
33. V. XI. Amnesty
34. V. XII. The New Roman Poetry
35. V. XI. Caelius and Milo
36. V. IX. Curio, V. X. Death of Curio
37. IV. XIII. Sciences
38. A remarkable example is the general exposition regarding
cattle in the treatise on Husbandry (ii. 1) with the nine times
nine subdivisions of the doctrine of cattle-rearing, with
the "incredible but true" fact that the mares at Olisipo (Lisbon)
become pregnant by the wind, and generally with its singular
mixture of philosophical, historical, and agricultural notices.
39. Thus Varro derives -facere- from -facies-, because he who
makes anything gives to it an appearance, -volpes-, the fox, after
Stilo from -volare pedibus- as the flying-footed; Gaius Trebatius,
a philosophical jurist of this age, derives -sacellum- from -sacra
cella-, Figulus -frater- from -fere alter- and so forth. This
practice, which appears not merely in isolated instances but as
a main element of the philological literature of this age, presents
a very great resemblance to the mode in which till recently
comparative philology was prosecuted, before insight into
the organism of language put a stop to the occupation of the empirics.
40. V. XII. Grammatical Science
41. V. XI. Sciences of General Culture at This Period
42. V. XI. Reform of the Calendar
43. V. XII. Dramatic Spectacles
44. Such "Greek entertainments" were very frequent not merely in
the Greek cities of Italy, especially in Naples (Cic. pro Arch. 5,
10; Plut. Brut. 21), but even now also in Rome (iv. 192; Cic. Ad
Fam. vii. 1, 3; Ad Att. xvi. 5, 1; Sueton. Caes. 39; Plut. Brut.
21). When the well-known epitaph of Licinia Eucharis fourteen
years of age, which probably belongs to the end of this period,
makes this "girl well instructed and taught in all arts by
the Muses themselves" shine as a dancer in the private exhibitions of
noble houses and appear first in public on the Greek stage (-modo
nobilium ludos decoravi choro, et Graeca in scaena prima populo
apparui-), this doubtless can only mean that she was the first girl
that appeared on the public Greek stage in Rome; as generally
indeed it was not till this epoch that women began to come forward
publicly in Rome (p. 469).