Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius. Dill Samuel
was too proud to struggle out of poverty, by engaging in the industries which it despised. And the freedman, who occupied the vacant field, and rose to opulence, is even more an object of hatred to Juvenal and Martial than the recreant noble or the stingy patron. He was an alien of servile birth, and he had made himself wealthy by the usual method of thinking of nothing but gold. These men, who were not even free Romans, had mastered the power which commands the allegiance of the world. The rise of this new class to wealth and importance probably irritated men of Juvenal’s type more than any other sign of social injustice in their time. And the Trimalchio of Petronius, a man of low, tainted origin, the creature of economic accident, whose one faith is in the power of money, who boasts of his fortune as if it had been won by real talent or honourable [pg 99]service, who expends it with coarse ostentation and a ludicrous affectation of cultivated taste, may be tolerated in literature, if not in actual life, for the charm of a certain kindly bonhomie and honest vulgarity, which the art of Petronius has thrown around him. Yet, after all, we must concede to Juvenal and Martial, that such a person is always a somewhat unpleasing social product. But the subject is so important that it claims a chapter to itself. And, fortunately for us and our readers, the new freedmen were not all of the type of Trimalchio.
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CHAPTER III
THE SOCIETY OF THE FREEDMEN
The historian, who is occupied with war and politics, and the fate of princes and nobles, is apt to lose sight of great silent movements in the dim masses of society. And, in the history of the early Empire, the deadly conflict between the Emperor and the Senate, the carnival of luxury, and the tragic close of so many reigns, have diverted attention from social changes of immense moment. Not the least important of these was the rise of the freedmen, in the face of the most violent prejudice, both popular and aristocratic. And literature has thrown its whole weight on the side of prejudice, and given full vent alike to the scorn of the noble, and to the hate and envy of the plebeian. The movement, indeed, was so swift and far spreading that old conservative instincts might well be alarmed. Everywhere in the inscriptions freedmen are seen rising to wealth and consequence throughout the provinces, as well as in Italy, and winning popularity and influence by profuse benefactions to colleges and municipalities. In almost every district of the Roman Empire the order of the Augustales, which was composed to a great extent of wealthy freedmen,608 has left its memorials. “Freedman’s wealth” in Martial’s day had become a proverb.609 Not only are they crowding all the meaner trades, from which Roman pride shrank contemptuously, but, by industry, shrewdness, and speculative daring, they are becoming great capitalists and landowners on a senatorial scale. The Trimalchio of Petronius, who has not [pg 101]even seen some of his estates,610 if we allow for some artistic exaggeration, is undoubtedly the representative of a great class. In the reign of Nero, a debate arose in the Senate on the insolence and misconduct of freedmen.611 And it was argued by those opposed to any violent measures of repression, that the class was widely diffused; they were found in overwhelming numbers in the city tribes, in the lower offices of the civil service, in the establishments of the magistrates and priests; a considerable number even of the knights and Senate drew their origin from this source. If freedmen were marked off sharply as a separate grade, the scanty numbers of the freeborn would be revealed. In the reigns of Claudius and Nero especially, freedmen rose to the highest places in the imperial service, sometimes by unquestionable knowledge, tact, and ability, sometimes by less creditable arts. The promotion of a Narcissus or a Pallas was also a stroke of policy, the assertion of the prince’s independence of a jealous nobility. The rule of the freedmen was a bitter memory to the Senate.612 The scorn of Pliny for Pallas expresses the long pent-up feelings of his order; it is a belated vengeance for the humiliation they endured in the evil days when they heaped ridiculous flattery on the favourite, and voted him a fortune and a statue.613 Some part of the joy with which the accession of Trajan was hailed by the aristocracy was due to the hope that the despised interlopers would be relegated to their proper obscurity. Tacitus is undoubtedly glancing at the Claudian régime when he grimly congratulates the Germans on the fact that their freedmen are little above the level of slaves, that they have seldom any power in the family, and never in the State.614
It shows the immense force of old Roman conservatism and of social prejudice which is the same from age to age, when men so cultivated, yet of such widely different temperament and associations as Pliny and Tacitus, Juvenal and Martial615 and Petronius, denounce or ridicule an irresistible social movement. We can now see that the rise of the [pg 102]emancipated slave was not only inevitable, but that it was, on the whole, salutary and rich in promise for the future. The slave class of antiquity really corresponded to our free labouring class. But, unlike the mass of our artisans, it contained many who, from accident of birth and education, had a skill and knowledge which their masters often did not possess.616 The slaves who came from the ancient seats of civilisation in the East are not to be compared with the dark gross races who seem to be stamped by nature as of an inferior breed. This frequent mental and moral equality of the Roman slave with his master had forced itself upon men of the detached philosophic class, like Seneca, and on kindly aristocrats, like Pliny.617 It must have been hard to sit long hours in the library beside a cultivated slave-amanuensis, or to discuss the management of lands and mines and quarries with a shrewd, well-informed slave-agent, or to be charmed by the grace and wit of some fair, frail daughter of Ionia, without having some doubts raised as to the eternal justice of such an institution. Nay, it is certain that slaves were often treated as friends,618 and received freedom and a liberal bequest at their master’s death. Many educated slaves, as we have seen, rose to distinction and fortune as teachers and physicians.619 But the field of trade and industry was the most open and the most tempting. The Senator was forbidden, down to the last age of the Empire, both by law and sentiment, to increase his fortune by commerce.620 The plebeian, saturated with Roman prejudice, looking for support to the granaries of the state or the dole of the wealthy patron, turned with disdain from occupations which are in our days thought innocent, if not honourable. Juvenal feels almost as much scorn for the auctioneer and undertaker as he has for the pander, and treats almost as a criminal the merchant who braves the wintry Aegean with a cargo of wine from Crete.621 His friend Umbricius, worsted in the social struggle, and preparing to quit Rome for a retreat in Campania, among the other objects of his plebeian scorn, is [pg 103]specially disgusted with the low tribe who contract for the building of a house, or who farm the dues of a port or undertake to cleanse a river-bed.622 There is no room left in Rome for men who will not soil themselves with such sordid trades. Manifestly, if the satirist is not burlesquing the feeling of his class, there was plenty of room left for the vigorous freedman who could accept Vespasian’s motto that no gain is unsavoury.623 But those men had not only commercial tact and ability, the wit to see where money was to be made by seizing new openings and unoccupied fields for enterprise; they had also among them men of great ambitions, men capable of great affairs. It required no common deftness, suppleness, and vigilant energy for an old slave to work his way upwards through the grades of the imperial chancery, to thread the maze of deadly intrigue, in the reigns of Claudius or Nero, and to emerge at last as master of the palace. Yet one of these freedmen ministers, when he died, had served ten emperors, six of whom had come to a violent end.624 That a class so despised and depressed should rise to control the trade, and even the administration of the Empire, furnishes a presumption that they were needed, and that they were not unworthy of their destiny.
Yet however inevitable, or even desirable, this great revolution may seem to the cool critic of the twentieth century, it is possible that, had he lived in the first, he might have denounced it as vigorously as Juvenal. The literary and artistic spirit, often living in a past golden age, and remotely detached from the movements going on around it, is prone to regard them with uneasy suspicion. It is moved by sacred sentiment, by memories and distant ideals, by fastidious taste, which expresses itself often with passionate hatred for what seems to it revolutionary sacrilege. It is also apt to fasten on the more grotesque and vulgar traits