There is a temptation—fostered, of course, by pious impulses—to suppose that Christianity had somehow “triumphed” over Roman paganism by the fourth century, completely changing the religious horizon of Rome. Nothing could be further from the truth.
With the establishment of the Tetrarchy, no emperor spent any length of time in Rome. Once the caput mundi, it was no longer an effective center of power; its monopoly of power was gone. Perhaps because of this, its pagan institutions continued to flourish. The building of its huge defensive bulwark against barbarian invasion, the Aurelian Walls (309–12 and 402–3), with their fifteen-meter height and their 380 towers, created what Richard Krautheimer called “the greatest monument of late antique Rome.” Any list of the pagan enterprises of Rome in the thirty years before the arrival of its first Christian emperor, Constantine, would need to include the Baths of Diocletian, the Senate House on the Forum Romanum (rebuilt after fire in 283), the Basilica Julia (rebuilt after the same fire), the colossal hall of the Basilica Nova (with its three huge barrel-vaulted niches, built by Maxentius in his six-year reign, 306–12), the apsed hall of the Temple of Venus and Cupid, and much more. Fora, temples, sanctuaries, shrines were constantly being repaired and rebuilt. Through the fourth century, Rome seemed to visitors “an essentially classical, secular and pagan city.” The fourth-century gazetteers listed, among its contents, twenty-eight libraries, eleven fora, ten basilicas, eleven public baths, nine circuses and theaters, thirty-six triumphal arches, and forty-six brothels. Even after Constantine’s death, the persistence of pagan memory was strong. There may have been a “new Rome” and Constantine would of course change the city, but not so huge a change that it suddenly rendered old Rome itself irrelevant. Cities didn’t die at the stroke of a pen. The persistence of pagan memory was too strong for that. Rome remained a stronghold of enlightened paganism, drawn from Gnostic and Neoplatonic philosophies, strengthened by some of the greatest art and literature the world had ever seen, and supported by powerful and conservative local aristocrats. In those decades, to be conservative was to be anti-Christian—indeed, to regard Christianity itself as an intrusive lowbrow sect, not worth a civilized person’s attention except as an example of the kind of folly that was coming out of North Africa. If anyone had suggested to such a Roman that, at some future date, this little sect would be larger, richer, and more powerful than any number of Roman Empires, he would have thought the proposal lunatic. And the struggle over that transfer of power would be fierce.
For what could then have been more powerful than Rome? Or richer? The Tetrarchy may have disbanded the central power, but the more wars Rome won, the more its empire expanded, the richer it got: this was inevitable. And the richer it got, the more luxurious its life became. Not everyone’s life, obviously; but for the top 5 percent, life took on a character of manic overindulgence and extravagance, unpleasantly reminiscent of the life of the American super-rich today. “Frangitur ipsa suis Roma superba bonis,” wrote Sextus Propertius: “Proud Rome is now brought low by her wealth.” Pliny the Elder, writing as early as the first century C.E., estimated that at the “lowest reckoning” the expensive imports from India, China, and the Arabian peninsula “drain our empire of 100,000,000 sesterces every year—that is what our luxuries and womenfolk cost us.” Granted, Roman writers (just like American ones two thousand years later) were fond of invoking the good old days of the early Republic, when men were men, life was simple, and morality stricter. Why did frugality prevail in olden times? Because, Tacitus explained, we were once all citizens of one city. “Even when we were masters of Italy alone, we did not have the temptations of today. Victories in foreign wars taught us to devour the substance of others, victories in civil wars, our own.” Inveighing against recent luxury and decadence, Seneca pulled out all the stops:
We think ourselves poor and mean if our walls are not resplendent with large and costly mirrors; if our marbles from Alexandria are not set off by mosaics of Numidian stone, if they are not covered all over with an elaborate coating variegated to look like painting; if our vaulted ceilings are not concealed in glass; if our swimming pools—into which we lower our bodies after they have been drained weak by copious sweating—are not lined with Thasian marble, once a rare sight in a temple, or if the water does not flow from silver spigots.… We have become so luxurious that we will tread upon nothing but precious stones.
In the view of the historian Livy, writing around the same time, the appetite for debilitating luxury came to Rome from its conquests in the East, and was brought back by the military:
It was through the army serving in Asia that the beginnings of foreign luxury were introduced into the city. These men brought into Rome, for the first time, bronze couches, costly coverlets, tapestries, and other fabrics, and—what was at the time considered gorgeous furniture—pedestal tables and silver salvers. Banquets were made more attractive by the presence of girls who played on the harp.… The cook, whom the ancients regarded and treated as the lowest menial, was rising in value, and what had been a servile office came to be looked upon as a fine art.
What did these Romans eat and drink? The answer is a little disappointing, if your expectations of Roman food are based on the legendary blowouts recorded in Petronius’ Satyricon and other accounts of high living. We read of Trimalchio, a former slave grown immensely rich through speculation, entertaining guests in his house in Campania. They are shown a bronze donkey—Corinthian bronze, the most expensive kind—with panniers on its sides, one full of white and the other of black olives. There are silver dishes “laden with dormice sprinkled with honey and poppyseed…[and] sausages smoking-hot on a silver gridiron, with damsons and pomegranates sliced up …” Each dish is engraved with Trimalchio’s name and its own weight, so that all the guests know what it is worth. The pièce de résistance is a basket full of straw, with a carved wooden peahen sitting atop it, her wings spread. Two slaves set it down; trumpeters play a fanfare; the slaves rummage in the straw, finding egg after egg. Trimalchio exclaims: “My friends, I ordered peahens’ eggs to be set under a hen, and by Jove I am afraid they are half-hatched already; but let us try whether we can still suck them.” Each guest is given a silver spoon “weighing at least half a pound,” and they start on the eggs, which turn out to be made of “rich pastry.” Within, hidden in the yolk, the narrator finds a fine, plump figpecker, a great delicacy then, as now.