It was also a small matter compared with his achievements. He re-created the Roman state and its power, refreshed it, and set a pattern of Roman rule that would last some five hundred years. No other statesman of antiquity could have made such a claim. And to the extent that he could set a compelling example through his own way of life, he did that, too. Augustus had none of the obtrusive vices of his successors. He believed in dignity but not pomposity; in ceremony, where necessary and within the limits proper to a chief priest, but not in Oriental showiness, even though he was regarded as a divine being, Divus Augustus. Nor was he given to luxurious display, despite his overwhelming wealth. Few later emperors—Claudius and Hadrian being among the exceptions—would show such an understanding of the difference between auctoritas (authoritative influence) and imperium (command from above).
Augustus was no glutton. He lived, and ate, with moderation. “He … preferred the food of the common people,” recalled Suetonius, “especially the coarser sort of bread, whitebait, fresh hand-pressed cheese … and would not wait for dinner, but ate anywhere.” In oratory, he loathed what he called “the stink of far-fetched phrases.” But he “gave all possible encouragement to intellectuals; he would politely and patiently attend readings not only of their poems and historical works, but of their speeches and dialogues; yet objected to being made the theme of any work unless the author were known as a serious and reputable writer.” He also possessed a dry sense of humor, if one is to believe some of the stories about him. He went to a courtier’s house for dinner and was served a poor, unelaborated meal. As he was taking his leave, he murmured, “I’d no idea I was such a close friend of yours.” Learning of the death of a Roman eques who (without anyone’s knowledge) had contracted debts of 20 million sesterces, Augustus sent an agent to the auction of the man’s property. There, he bought the man’s pillow for his personal use. Eyebrows were raised. But, the emperor explained, “The pillow on which he could rest with all those debts must be especially conducive to sleep.” And he could take a joke, or so it was said. Back in Rome after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra, he was approached by a man who offered him, for twenty thousand sesterces, a tame raven that had learned to croak, “Hail, Caesar, victor, commander!” Augustus gave him the money, but then a friend of the bird’s owner told him that he had a second raven, which he had trained to say, just in case, “Hail, Antony, commander, victor!” The bird was produced. It did indeed hail Antony. Instead of taking offense, the emperor merely told him to split the money with the friend. He was whimsical with his presents, which might be gold plate or, just as easily, “lengths of goat-hair cloth, or sponges, or pokers, or tongs.”
At the top of the social tree, in this newly stabilized Rome, below the emperor himself, were the senators and their families. It was not in Augustus’ interest to lord it over them, since that would have diminished his pretense to be primus inter pares, first among equals, and increased the risk that disaffected citizens might see him as a king. The senators were traditionally very much an elite, and Augustus was careful to preserve that status for them—even though, under his rule, they had less and less to do. Particularly important for senatorial self-esteem were the magistracies, which they (and they alone) could hold. They were expected to set standards of dignity, and at times compelled by law to do so—no senator could marry an ex-slave, appear onstage as an actor, or (unthinkable liberty!) enter the arena as a gladiator. Property qualifications also existed: in practice, by Augustus’ time, there was no senatorship for men who owned less than a million sesterces.
Below the senators were the equites, or knights and squires. In earlier days of the Republic, they had been a cavalry force, hence relatively wealthy. This no longer applied, since under the later Republic and the Principate cavalry was supplied by Rome’s allied states. But one still needed to be quite rich—400,000 sesterces or more—to qualify as an eques.
Then came the plebs, or ordinary people—the majority of Roman citizens. Some were born free, but others were liberti or freedmen, former slaves who had been manumitted by their owners. No stigma attached to being a libertus, and none to the free children of slaves. On the contrary: it was a matter for congratulation. When the novelist Petronius depicted the freedman Trimalchio in the Satyricon flaunting his status, it was not with contempt, still less with hate: Trimalchio might indeed be vulgar, gross, and a bit of a thug, like a goodly portion of the citizens of the Upper East Side today, but he had made it into respectability, and who was going to rebuke a former slave for waving his cash around?
At the bottom of the Roman social order, one comes to the slaves, without whom the society as a whole could not possibly have functioned. Their legal status was simple. They were chattels, things, owned absolutely by their masters, who could buy and sell them as they pleased, and assign them to do any work they wanted.
The fact that slave labor was less efficient than free was well known to the Romans, because it was the first big thing a slave owner learned. Pliny, for instance, attributed the high food productivity of pre-imperial Rome to its reliance on free workers on farms, and its fall in his own time to the general use of slave labor. “In those days,” he wrote, more as a moralist than an economist,
…the lands were tilled by the hands of the very generals, the soil exulting beneath the plowshare crowned with wreaths of laurel and guided by a husbandman graced with triumphs.… But today these same lands are tilled by slaves whose legs are in chains, by the hands of malefactors and men with branded faces.… And we are surprised that the yields from the labor of workhouse slaves are not the same as from the honest toil of warriors!
Nevertheless, given the choice, what Roman was going to do without his or her slaves? Most slave owners had few, perhaps no more than one or two—just like most landowners in the slave South of America before the Civil War—but the slave populations of some upper capitalist families in Rome were truly impressive. The freedman Gaius Caecilius Isidorus, toward the end of the first century C.E., left 4,116 slaves when he died. More than a few Roman bigwigs owned 1,000 slaves, and the emperor might be served by as many as 20,000. But the statistics are unreliable, especially for the top end of slaveholding. It is conventionally supposed that about one person in three in imperial Rome was a slave.
What did they do? Just about everything. They served, performing an incredible number and variety of tasks and services, which rose almost to a madness of detail in the division of labor. Slaves worked as water carriers, valets, bricklayers, and litter bearers. Their rural equivalents pruned the vines, fed the pigs, sowed and harvested the wheat. They were secretaries, draftsmen, accountants, stone carvers, and teachers. The great man’s toilette would be taken care of by the bathing attendants (balneatores), the masseurs (aliptae), the hairdressers (ornatores), and the barbers (tonsores). His food would be prepared by pastry cooks (libarii), bakers (pistores), and other kinds of coquus or cook, and served up by the structores (majordomos), the dining-room attendants (triclinarii), the waiters who carried the dishes in (ministratores), and those who took them out again (analectae). Before any food was eaten by the owner, it would be tasted, just in case an enemy had reached the kitchen, by the praegustatores. At intervals in the parade of dishes, the emperor or aristocrat would be entertained by dancing girls (saltatrices), dwarfs (nani), and buffoons (moriones). If a slave was the body servant or the secretary of a master, that implied a certain trust, even closeness. It also meant, however, that the slave would be treated as one who had privileged information, which could lead to torture under interrogation.