This kind of gastro-pornography is what springs to mind when most people today think of Roman food, but it has little to do with what the vast majority of Romans actually ate. Their daily fodder was much more likely to be polenta (a corn porridge, either hot and gloppy or, when congealed, refried in slices), beans, and bitter herbs, with meat (preferably pork) as a rarity, and eggs and an occasional chicken. Most working-class Romans subsisted largely on pulses and bread. A lot of cheese was eaten, and there cannot have been much difference between the pecorinos or sheep’s-milk cheeses consumed today and those of Roman times. Vegetables, of course, made an appearance, in such forms as a delicious preparation of young zucchini known as scapece, which is still served in some Roman restaurants. There would also be fish, though without refrigeration it cannot often have been fresh. The very rich were able to maintain fishponds—there are even horror stories about slaves being fed to their enormous eels. The universal stimulant of appetite was garum, a decoction of rotting fish guts, which seems to have resembled a very smelly and salty ancestor of Worcestershire sauce. Roman households consumed it rather as lower-class Americans today consume tomato ketchup, putting it on everything. We tend to assume that garum merely stank of rotten fish, but it must have had a more subtle taste than that.
The potato, the tomato, and all other imports from the undiscovered New World were, of course, unknown. So was sugarcane. When a Roman cook wanted to sweeten a dish, he did it with honey.
Another outlet for Roman wealth and decadence during this time was art. Just as today, the prices of fashionable “fine” art were fantastically inflated: ancient Rome, it seems, had its equivalents to the hysterical, grotesque pricing of Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. The orator Lucius Crassus paid an incredible 100,000 sesterces for two silver goblets engraved by Mentor, a famed Greek silversmith, “but he confessed that for shame he had never dared use them.” Corinthian bronzes were so prized for their workmanship that they cost whole family fortunes. Pliny reported that one ivory table changed hands at 1.3 million sesterces—“the price of a large estate, supposing someone preferred to devote so large a sum to the purchase of landed property.”
Still another was jewelry. The display of precious stones by some Roman matrons was grotesquely excessive, and the matrons themselves were monsters of vulgarity, just like today’s. Here was Lollia Paulina, third wife of the Emperor Caligula, whose beauty equaled her vulgarity, “at an ordinary betrothal banquet covered with emeralds and pearls interlaced with each other and shining all over her head, hair, ears, neck, and fingers, their total value amounting to 40,000,000 sesterces, and she herself ready at a moment’s notice to show the bills of sale in proof of ownership.” By the Tiber as under the lights of Broadway, diamonds really were a girl’s best friend. The spread of empire inevitably brought with it an increased supply of luxury goods and precious baubles: emeralds from Egypt and the Urals, sapphires from Sri Lanka, amethysts and diamonds from India. The finest Chinese silk traded for gigantic prices: a pound of silk for a pound of gold was not unknown. Perhaps the favorite Roman jewel was the pearl (margarita), yielded by all Rome’s oceans. Naturally, the abundance of precious and semi-precious materials helped create a large class of luxury craftworkers. More relics of their industry would, no doubt, have come down to us if Rome had not so frequently been sacked.
The most spectacularly ostentatious piece of art-stuffed real estate in Roman antiquity—surpassing even the Golden House of Nero—was a villa built for the Emperor Hadrian at Tivoli, twenty miles northeast of Rome. To call it “Hadrian’s Villa” seems a complete understatement, since its site was about the same size as central Las Vegas, some three hundred hectares, twice the area of Pompeii. Like some abandoned Mayan city, Tikal perhaps, it has only been partially excavated, despite the enormous number of statues and other works of art removed (looted) from it over the last few centuries and dispersed to museums in London, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Saint Petersburg, not to mention Rome itself and, of course, unlisted private collections. Some historians of antiquity think that only 10–20 percent of the full constructed area of the “villa” has been dug up and disclosed, which would make it the biggest unstudied ancient site in Italy or the Roman world.
One particular kind of ancient statue is associated with the villa—the naked, idealized likeness of Hadrian’s lover Antinous, the Greek homosexual pinup par excellence, whose fetching body and pouting Elvis mouth proliferated all over the Empire after he drowned in the Nile in 130 C.E. But the contents of the villa reflect a general culture of intense imitation in which one version after another of Greatest Sculptural Hits was turned out to imperial order by craftsmen whose sole task was to create a cultural dreamscape: a wondrous Greece re-created in (or just outside) Rome. The idea of “heroic invention,” which is the basis of modern worship of the new, did not exist in classical times, and would have been regarded as a zany aberration, not as a sign of excellence. One of the results has been that Roman copies, or (relatively) free variants, of Greek originals have become almost all we know of the original art of Greece; with the exception of a few indisputably Greek-made masterpieces, such as the Parthenon Marbles, Greece is now largely Roman. And because so many “Greek” masterpieces were either made by Greeks in Rome for Roman clients, or made by Romans in Rome, or completed in Rome by local craftsmen after the original block had been roughed out in Greece, the problem of saying anything certain about the origins and nature of classical art objects is usually insoluble. But one thing seems fairly certain. In its quality of sculpture, ancient Rome could never rival ancient Athens. Phidias had many Roman imitators, but there was no Roman Phidias. Most Roman sculpture is, at best, faithfully descriptive—one thinks of the realistic funerary portraits of slightly grim-looking citizens, tight with virtue. Great sculpture, like the panels celebrating Augustus on the Ara Pacis, is very much the exception, and when it occurs one may fairly suppose the authorship of Greek or at least Greek-trained carvers. Virgil was right: the great art of Rome was not sculpting, but ruling.
4
Pagans Versus Christians
It makes little real sense to speak of “the end of the Roman Empire” as though that enormous social structure suddenly came undone or ceased to exist. In forms both powerful and merely vestigial, it continued to provide the framework of international society throughout Europe for hundreds of years. That said, starting with the reign of Constantine, the conflict between the old pagan rule and the new Christian might would slowly erode the Empire’s potency.
The first persecutions launched against the Christians by Rome’s emperors were relatively small affairs, but none the saner for that. It must seem strange that a city as abundant in sects and cult objects as imperial Rome should have persecuted anyone for holding unorthodox beliefs—there was, one might have thought, more than enough superstition for everyone—but in imperial times that was not how the ruling and priestly classes saw the matter, and for two reasons.
One was that the Christians refused to pay divine honors to the emperor. They would not pray or sacrifice to him as a god. Even a token participation in Roman religious rituals would probably have satisfied the authorities. But to refuse them altogether was an act of defiance. It was resented as a crass form of lèse-majesté. Christians seemed bound together by ties of common belief and worship which had nothing to do with the ordinary relationships between Romans and their gods. Those relationships underwrote the stability of the Roman state. The Christians seemed more loyal to their secret society, which could only mean that they were disloyal to Rome.