It is a terrible picture, obviously exaggerated; eloquence is seldom accurate. Doubtless then, as now, virtue modestly hid its head, and yielded the front page to vice, misfortune, politics, and crime. Augustine paints almost as dark a picture for a like moralizing end; he complains that the churches are often emptied by the competition of dancing girls displaying in the theaters their disencumbered charms.25 The public games still saw the slaughter of convicts and captives to make a holiday. We surmise the lavish cruelty of such spectacles when Symmachus writes that he spent $900,000 on one celebration, and that the twenty-nine Saxon gladiators who were scheduled to fight in the arena cheated him by strangling one another in compact suicide before the games began.26 In fourth-century Rome there were 175 holidays in the year; ten with gladiatorial contests; sixty-four with circus performances; the rest with shows in the theaters.27 The barbarians took advantage of this passion for vicarious battle by attacking Carthage, Antioch, and Trier while the people were absorbed at the amphitheater or the circus.28 In the year 404 a gladiatorial program celebrated at Rome the dubious victory of Stilicho at Pollentia. Blood had begun to flow when an Oriental monk, Telemachus, leaped from the stands into the arena and demanded that the combats cease. The infuriated spectators stoned him to death; but the Emperor Honorius, moved by the scene, issued an edict abolishing gladiatorial games.* Circus races continued till 549, when they were ended by the exhaustion of the city’s wealth in the Gothic wars.
Culturally, Rome had not seen so busy an age since Pliny and Tacitus. Music was the rage; Ammianus29 complains that it had displaced philosophy, and had “turned the libraries into tombs”; he describes gigantic hydraulic organs, and lyres as large as chariots. Schools were numerous; everyone, says Symmachus, had an opportunity to develop his capacities.30 The “universities” of professors paid by the state taught grammar, rhetoric, literature, and philosophy to students drawn from all the Western provinces, while the encompassing barbarians patiently studied the arts of war. Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from the trunk.
Into this city of a million souls, about the year 365, came a Syrian Greek of noble birth and handsome figure, Ammianus Marcellinus of Antioch. He had been a soldier on the staff of Ursicinus in Mesopotamia as an active participant in the wars of Constantius, Julian, and Jovian; he had lived before he wrote. When peace came in the East he retired to Rome, and undertook to complete Livy and Tacitus by writing the history of the Empire from Nerva to Valens. He wrote a difficult and involved Latin, like a German writing French; he had read too much Tacitus, and had too long spoken Greek. He was a frank pagan, an admirer of Julian, a scorner of the luxury that he ascribed to the bishops of Rome; but for all that he was generally impartial, praised many aspects of Christianity, and condemned Julian’s restriction of academic freedom as a fault “to be overwhelmed with eternal silence.”31 He was as well educated as a soldier can find time to be. He believed in demons and theurgy, and quoted in favor of divination its archopponent Cicero.32 But he was, by and large, a blunt and honest man, just to all factions and men; “no wordy deceit adorns my tale, but untrammeled faithfulness to facts.”33 He hated oppression, extravagance, and display, and spoke his mind about them wherever found. He was the last of the classic historians; after him, in the Latin world, there were only chroniclers.
In that same Rome whose manners seemed to Ammianus snobbish and corrupt, Macrobius found a society of men who graced their wealth with courtesy, culture, and philanthropy. He was primarily a scholar, loving books and a quiet life; in 399, however, we find him serving as vicarius, or imperial legate, in Spain. His Commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio became a popular vehicle of Neoplatonist mysticism and philosophy. His chef-d’oeuvre, quoted by almost every historian these last 1500 years, was the Saturnalia, or Feast of Saturn, a “Curiosities of Literature” in which the author gathered the heterogeneous harvest of his studious days and bookish nights. He improved upon Aulus Gellius while poaching upon him, by putting his material into the form of an imaginary dialogue among real men—Praetextatus, Symmachus, Flavian, Servius, and others—gathered to celebrate the three-day feast of the Saturnalia with good wine, good food, and learned conversation. Disarius, a physician, is asked some medical questions: Is a simple better than a varied diet?—Why do women rarely, and old men so regularly, get drunk?—“Is the nature of women colder or hotter than that of men?” There is a discourse on the calendar, a long analysis of Virgil’s vocabulary, grammar, style, philosophy, and plagiarisms; a collection of bons mots from all ages; a treatise on rich banquets and rare foods. In the evenings lighter questions amuse these pundits. Why do we blush with shame and pale with fear?—Why does baldness begin at the top of the head?—Which came first, the chicken or the egg? (Ovumne prius fuerit an gallina?)34 Here and there in the medley are some noble passages, as when the senator Praetextatus speaks of slavery:
I shall value men not by their status but by their manners and their morals; these come from our character, that from chance. … You must seek for your friends, Evangelus, not only in the Forum or the Senate, but in your own house. Treat your slave with gentleness and goodness, admit him to your conversation, occasionally even into your intimate council. Our ancestors, removing pride from the master and shame from the slave, called the former pater familias, the latter familiaris (i.e., one of the family). Your slaves will respect you more readily than they will fear you.35
It was some such circle as this that, about 394, welcomed into its number a poet destined to sing the swan song of Rome’s magnificence. Claudius Claudianus, like Ammianus, was born in the East, and spoke Greek as a mother tongue; but he must have learned Latin at an early age to write it so fluently well. After a short stay in Rome he went to Milan, found a place on Stilicho’s staff, became unofficial poet laureate to the Emperor Honorius, and married a lady of birth and wealth; Claudian had an eye to the main chance, and did not propose to be buried in Potter’s Field. He served Stilicho with melodious panegyrics and with savagely vituperative poems against Stilicho’s rivals. In 400 he returned to Rome, and was gratefully acclaimed when, in a poem “On the Consulate of Stilicho,” he wrote for the Eternal City a eulogy worthy of Virgil himself: