PEOPLE & SOCIETY
citizens, cives Romani Roman citizenship was a privileged status that afforded its holder various rights and privileges including ius commercii (the right to enter into legal contracts and hold property) and ius conubii (the right to marry a Roman citizen and to pass on citizenship to children). The most privileged group, citizens optimo iure, also enjoyed ius suffragii (the right to vote in Roman assemblies) and ius honorum (the right to hold political office). Women and freed slaves had more limited citizen rights.
censor, census A Roman magistrate (one of a pair) elected for 18 months to maintain the list (census) of Roman citizens. Their authority extended to supervising the moral conduct of citizens, revising the membership of the senate, and letting public contracts. Under the principate the emperors assumed responsibility for the censors’ functions.
cursus honorum The career path of an ambitious Roman senator, ascending through the various grades of magistracy (with their minimum age requirements) to the consulship and censorship.
epigraphic Term used to describe the thousands of inscriptions placed on Roman buildings and statues.
eques (pl. equites) A social class of Roman “knights,” in origin the cavalry troops of republican Rome and later the leading gentry of Italy and the provinces. Less wealthy and powerful than the political senatorial class, but influential in the military, commercial life, and the courts. Emperors used the equites in a variety of administrative roles.
freedmen Roman slaves could aspire to winning their freedom through manumission (literally, “sending from the hand”), bestowed by their master or left in their wills. A freedman—or woman—became a citizen, but still owed certain obligations to his or her former master, and was barred from holding public office.
governor The official who ran a province of the Roman empire—usually a former magistrate of the Roman state.
Latins Inhabitants of Latium, the area of central Italy where Rome was founded.
manumission See freedmen
new men Novus homo or “new man” was a term used in the late republic for the first man of a Roman family to reach the senate or consulship, penetrating the closed world of the nobility. Marius and Cicero are examples.
patrician A privileged aristocratic class of Roman citizens who had a monopoly on political office and priesthoods in the early Roman republic. During the principate, the emperors bestowed hereditary patrician status on their supporters.
paterfamilias, patria potestas The head of a Roman family, with various degrees of legal and moral authority (patria potestas) over wife, children, clients, slaves, and freedmen.
plebeian The non-patrician citizenry of Rome. Initially excluded from power, they won equality and political representation by 287 BCE through the “conflict of the orders,” a two-century long struggle in which they threatened to leave Rome altogether if their demands were not met.
principate Name for the system of one-man rule established by Augustus, Rome’s first emperor or princeps (a Latin word that translates roughly as “first citizen”).
proscription The public outlawing of an individual and the confiscation of his property. Used by Sulla, Mark Antony, and Octavian (the future Augustus) to get rid of enemies and to raise money; widely feared and resented.
salutatio The formal morning ceremony in which Roman citizen clients visited the house of their patron to greet him and perhaps receive a favor or gift.
socii Rome’s allied communities: the peoples and city-states in the Italian peninsula bound by formal agreement in treaties to provide men and monies to Rome.
tribute of the plebs Magistrate charged with defending the interests of the plebeians, and granted special powers and privileges to do so.
Vestal Virgins The six priestesses of Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth-fire, who were charged with certain sacred duties and forbidden marriage until their term of at least 30 years’ service had ended.
the 30-second history
Roman citizens, the cives Romani, were the men who ran Rome: citizens enjoyed the right to vote and the right to stand for office, the right to sue another citizen and the right to stand trial if accused of a crime—although they were also obliged to pay tax and take up arms for their country. Yet it was their decision-making power—the opportunity to choose Rome’s leaders and shape its future—that carried most weight, for the political system placed that power in the hands of the people. Individuals voted as members of a tribe, and their collective tribal vote was counted. During the Republic, full enfranchisement was restricted to men born to citizen parents within a legal marriage; women, freed slaves, and members of local Latin-speaking tribes had more limited rights. The year 90 BCE, however, marked the transformation of Roman citizen membership: Rome’s Italian allies went to war to secure citizenship—and the vote—for themselves. The so-called Social War ended in 88 BCE, when the Romans passed a law granting full citizenship to both Latins and allies. However, by the turn of the century, Rome was ruled by an emperor and, although citizens still voted, it was with diminished influence. Citizenship had been fundamentally redefined.
3-SECOND SURVEY
Roman citizen men enjoyed certain rights: suffragium—the right to vote; commercium—the right to enter into legal contracts; and conubium—the right to marry.
3-MINUTE EXCAVATION
The body of the citizen man was inviolable: by law, a Roman citizen could not be beaten or put to death. In 70 BCE, the orator Cicero accused Gaius Verres of extortion and embezzlement while he was governor of Sicily—but much more damning was that Verres had apparently executed a man without trial despite the victim’s very vocal claims that he was a Roman citizen.
RELATED HISTORIES
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
GAIUS VERRES
120–43 BCE
Roman magistrate and governor of Sicily, infamous for exploiting his authority
106–43 BCE
Roman orator, statesman and philosopher
30-SECOND TEXT
Susanne Turner
The privileges of citizenship, which carried political and legal status, were desired by Romans and barbarians alike.
the 30-second history
The Roman economy and way of life depended on the unpaid labour of slaves. Male and female slaves provided skilled and unskilled services, not just performing back-breaking work in the fields and mines, but tutoring children, balancing the books, and providing easy sources of sexual satisfaction. A rich Roman might own 500 slaves—and the number in the imperial household probably exceeded 20,000, where a slave could reach heady heights of power and influence beyond many free citizens. Slaves perhaps numbered 25 percent of Rome’s population. Life as a slave could be brutal: tens of thousands were worked to death in mines and quarries. As items of property, slaves had no rights and little voice of their own. Many must have been treated no better than animals, but others were surely considered one of the family. Some were lucky enough to buy or be granted their freedom. Manumission brought citizen status, but freed slaves never quite lost their servile origins. Full citizen rights were denied to first-generation freedmen and patronage relationships ensured that owners continued to profit from them—the business ventures of experienced freedmen could be very successful, making ex-slaves number among some of the wealthiest Romans.
3-SECOND SURVEY
Roman slaves were the workforce of Rome, but they had no legal personhood—they were defined not as individuals with rights but as property, or chattels.
3-MINUTE EXCAVATION
In 73 BCE, a gang of slaves led by Spartacus escaped from a gladiatorial school in Capua. Soon their ranks swelled with more escaped slaves. Spartacus proved himself an excellent tactician and led the legions of Crassus and Pompey on a merry dance around central Italy until his army was finally defeated in 71 BCE. Six thousand captured slaves were crucified along the Appian Way, but Spartacus’s body was never found.
RELATED HISTORIES
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
MARCUS LICINIUS CRASSUS
115–53 BCE
Roman general and politician who later entered into the political partnership with Pompey and Caesar
POMPEY THE GREAT
106–48 BCE
Enormously successful Roman general who celebrated three triumphs but was beheaded during civil war
30-SECOND TEXT
Susanne Turner
For wealthy Romans, the practice of slavery was accepted as the norm on which their privileged lifestyle depended.
the 30-second history
The inhabitants of Ancient Rome were not born equal. Being a slave is sometimes described as a form of “social death” and even wealthy freedmen never shook off the stigma of their lowly origins. But not all citizens were of equal rank or influence: Roman society was hierarchical. Citizens were born either patrician or plebeian. Political and religious power was entrusted primarily to the patricians, although the position of the tribune of the plebs ensured that the latter had a political voice. The census further divided the aristocratic class into senatorial and equestrian orders by wealth: to qualify as an eques a man had to prove he held property valued at 400,000 sesterces; to be a senator he had to be worth 1,000,000. Movement between the orders, while not impossible, was difficult. Men who managed to progress from equestrian rank into the senate were known as “new men.” Aristocratic and lesser men were, however, tied by relationships of patronage. Each morning, clients flocked to the houses of their patrons, demonstrating their loyalty in a ritual called salutatio. Patronage was mutually beneficial: clients gained financial and political support, patrons gained a network of loyal representatives.
3-SECOND SURVEY
Roman citizens were traditionally divided into patricians and plebeians. While the plebs were more numerous, political power was concentrated in the hands of the patricians.
3-MINUTE EXCAVATION
Marcus Tullius Cicero was a novus homo or “new man.” His family was of the equestrian order and no members of the senate numbered among his ancestors: he had neither family name nor connections to exploit to gain his first step on the cursus honorum. He was no soldier, so he relied on his skill in the lawcourts. His command of words made him the first new man in 80 years to become consul, in 63 BCE.
RELATED HISTORIES
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
157–83 BCE
Roman general and new man, famed for reforming the Roman army
MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO
106–43 BCE
Roman orator, statesman, philosopher, and new man
30-SECOND TEXT
Susanne Turner
Class was rigidly bound, legally enforced, and reinforced by dress code; the toga was worn to denote the power and social standing of citizens.
Augustus was Rome’s first emperor. He inherited the wreckage of the republican state and against the odds crafted it into a lasting imperial system centered on his own person. Though his methods were frequently harsh, by putting an end to civil war he ushered in an era of peace that he (and others) presented as a golden age for Rome.
Born Gaius Octavius, “Augustus” (meaning, loosely, “revered,” or “sacred”) was the title he took in 27 BCE. He impressed his great-uncle Julius Caesar and was adopted as his heir. When Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE, the 17-year-old moved quickly to assume the leadership of the pro-Caesar faction. An uneasy coalition with Caesar’s old partner Marc Antony disintegrated into civil war, which ended with the death of Antony and Cleopatra in 30 BCE and the Roman conquest of Egypt.
Now undisputed ruler of Rome, Augustus sought to accommodate his own personal authority within the remains of the republican constitution, to provide a semblance of reassuring continuity. In reality his continually renewed tenure of the highest offices, and complete control of appointments to the senate and other posts, gave him unprecedented power.
Augustus justified this position to his subjects partly through his cultural patronage, sponsoring a generation of poets, including Horace and Virgil, and erecting splendid public buildings across Rome (leading him to boast that he had “found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble”). He was also successful in war, doubling the size of the empire and fostering a sense of Rome’s divinely ordained dominion.
Augustus presented himself as a fatherlike figure, and his own family as a model for the proper conduct expected of Romans through his social legislation on marriage and childbearing. Though this caused problems—Augustus had to exile his own daughter and granddaughter for their adultery—it allowed him to lay the foundations of a dynastic system. His own long life, and the inevitable chicanery of palace politics, saw several choices of successor come and go before he had to settle on his morose stepson Tiberius, but his system of individual imperial rule survived for three centuries. Like Julius Caesar, he was deified after his death by successors reliant on his legacy for their legitimacy.
Matthew Nicholls
Born Gaius Octavius
47 BCE
Appointed pontifex, or priest
September 13th, 45 BCE
Julius Caesar, by now supreme at Rome, names Octavius as his heir
March 15th, 44 BCE
Assassination of Caesar
43 BCE
Formation of second triumvirate between Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus
39 BCE
Octavian marries Livia Drusilla
30s BCE
Victories against foreign and domestic enemies; relationship with Antony breaks down
31 BCE
Victory over Antony at the naval battle of Actium, followed by the conquest of Egypt
27 BCE
Octavian “restores the republic” by reinstating the senate and magistrates, and takes the title Augustus
23 BCE
Second constitutional settlement, organizing Augustus’s power at Rome and in the provinces
18–17 BCE
Moral and social legislation passed
14 CE
Augustus dies in his late seventies; power passes to his stepson Tiberius, the second emperor of Rome
the 30-second history
The traditional history of Rome is, in so many ways, a history of men. Roman men ruled the roost, at home and away. In the public arena, it was men who went to war, who held office and priesthoods, who ruled as emperors—and who wrote history. At home, the (male) head was the paterfamilias, who held patria potestas—the power to make life and death choices for his household, as well as more pedestrian choices about family finances and worshipping ancestral gods. Children, male and female, stayed under the patria potestas of the paterfamilias for his lifetime even after they married. By the early empire, women remained under their father’s patria potestas and husbands had no legal control over them; marriage was, in a sense, a source of empowerment and wives enjoyed a certain degree of freedom. Women could own and inherit property, write wills, and run businesses. But they were never full citizens; they had no vote and could not stand for office. Only the Vestal Virgins gained a degree of autonomy and official visibility, committed from childhood to a life of celibacy and ritual service by their patrician families. For most women, in all walks of life, opportunities remained defined by men.
3-SECOND SURVEY
Power, political and domestic, was concentrated in the hands of men, but women maintained a sometimes surprising degree of freedom.
3-MINUTE EXCAVATION
Divorce was not uncommon in the Roman world, but emperor Augustus tried to crack down on husband/wife swapping and bachelordom, aimed at ensuring the senatorial class committed to marriage and reproduced. He passed laws rewarding the birth of multiple children and penalizing young men who failed to marry. He even made adultery punishable by banishment—and unfortunately, in 2 BCE, was forced to exile his own daughter for this crime.
RELATED HISTORIES
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
AUGUSTUS
63 BCE—14 CE
First Roman emperor, whose moral legislation made the private lives of citizens a concern of the state
JULIA THE ELDER
39 BCE–14 CE
Augustus’s only daughter, died in exile on a tiny island
30-SECOND TEXT
Susanne Turner
Ancient Rome was a patriarchal society—the role and status of women were defined by those of their fathers or husbands.
the 30-second history
Sex seems to have been rife in the Roman world: emperors had multiple partners (of both sexes), poets turned their mistresses into muses, house-owners decorated their walls with erotic images (including, memorably, the god Priapus weighing his own impressive member—in an entrance hall!); even the streets were lined with disembodied penises. But it wasn’t all orgies, wife-swapping, and sexual abandon: such stories are doubtless more fantasy than reality. Pudor (shame, modesty) was enshrined in law and the censors could—and did—expel senators for sexual misdemeanor. The real pressure to uphold sexual standards was placed on women, who were expected to exhibit proper pudicitia (modesty, chastity) at all times. Pudicitia must often have been easier for elite women to embody than for their social inferiors; a prostitute or slave who found herself sexually available to her master likely found it near impossible to control her sexual boundaries; sexual roles—for both men and women—were codified according to social status. But a word of warning: Roman sexualities don’t map exactly onto ours. Romans had no words to express the identities “hetero-” or “homosexual” and seem to have been more concerned with sexual acts—who took active and passive roles—than sexual identities.
3-SECOND SURVEY
Sex may have been more visible in the Roman world, but it was no less subject to norms and controls than it is today.
3-MINUTE EXCAVATION
Roman writers reserved particular opprobrium for a type of man they called a cinaedus—a man with excess sexuality, unable to control himself—who might take a passive sexual role with other men, but also couldn’t be trusted with other men’s wives. Cinaedi liked sex a little too much and so failed at being a proper Roman man—and their lack of self-control showed in an effeminate gait, voice, and facial features.
RELATED HISTORIES
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
MESSALINA
ca. 22–48 CE
Third wife of Claudius and a notorious nymphomaniac
ELAGABALUS
205–222 CE
Juvenile emperor (218–222 CE), known more for his sexual depravity than his reign
30-SECOND TEXT
Susanne Turner
Erotica is well-represented in ancient Roman literature and art but in reality sexual conduct was bound up with power, status, and social norms.
the 30-second history
The geographically extensive and demographically diverse Roman empire was ruled by the emperor and his provincial governors, or by pliable “client kings,” and peace kept by the legions, but in reality these forces were spread thin, often concentrated at trouble points, and impeded by the slow pace of communications. Much of the Roman empire knew Rome as a relatively distant presence, coming into contact with Roman power through law, taxation, census, and coinage (as Christ’s “render unto Caesar” remark shows). Roman influence could be felt in the countryside, as large villa estates and productive farming methods fed distant Roman markets, but it was particularly in the towns and cities of the empire where distinctive architectural forms suggested Roman ways of living: fora, bathhouses, theaters, and amphitheaters set in straight grids of streets. The extent to which we can call this “Romanization” is still hotly debated, however; Rome rarely rode roughshod over local cultures, tending more to co-opt and reward willing indigenous factions. The successful elites—the men who wrote our literary and epigraphic sources—responded with enthusiasm, leading the adoption of Roman styles of living, but with many rich local variations; resistance and discontent are naturally harder to find in the surviving evidence.
3-SECOND SURVEY
Life in the provinces of the Roman empire varied dramatically according to time and place; Rome’s influence was sometimes overwhelming, and sometimes subtle.
3-MINUTE EXCAVATION
Though our evidence is incomplete and differs by period and locale, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the “pax Romana” enabled an enormous upsurge in productivity and trade, and accordingly in fine architecture and the amenities of civilized living, in the provinces. Regions like Gaul or Britain that initially resisted Roman invasion produced over time some of the richest expressions of Roman provincial life, but it is difficult to know how far into society these benefits of the Roman peace extended.
RELATED HISTORIES
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
AELIUS ARISTIDES
117–181 CE
Greek showpiece orator who lavishes praise on imperial Rome
61 CE
Iconic queen of the Iceni tribe who rose in doomed revolt, abused by Roman colonists
61–112 CE
Roman governor of Bithynia-Pontus province (109–111); his letters tell of provincial life
30-SECOND TEXT
Matthew Nicholls
Architectural remains may skew our view that the provinces were fully “Romanized.”
the 30-second history
The rule of law was a vital part of the spread and legacy of Roman power. Essential for articulating the activities of government and for mediating social and commercial relationships, Rome’s formidable legal tradition provided a common framework in an increasingly large and disparate empire. Rome had been governed by written laws since the earliest times: the Lapis Niger (“black stone”) found in the Roman forum contains a sacred law code from as early as the sixth century BCE. As the state transformed into a republic and acquired its first overseas territories, its need for clear and consistent laws, and magistrates, increased; the arrival of the emperors added another layer. From the “Twelve Tables” of ca. 450 BCE to Justinian’s sixth-century CE legal codification, Rome built up a thousand years of civil, magisterial, and imperial law. Political power in the Roman state was often won through excellence as a courtroom lawyer; the jobs of many Roman politicians, among them provincial governors, included deciding cases as magistrates. In the late republic and empire, learned “jurists” assisted the emperor and his magistrates with legal opinions, edicts, and commentaries, analyzing and modifying the ever-growing body of laws to ensure universality and consistency.
3-SECOND SURVEY
Though not as visible as an aqueduct or an amphitheater, Roman law was as essential to the fabric and longevity of the empire.
3-MINUTE EXCAVATION
“Justice is the constant and perpetual will to render to every man his due”: so wrote Ulpian. Such learned jurists, often advisers to the emperors, established law as a profession through writing and teaching, and in doing so helped embed it deeply into Roman society. The influence of Roman law lived on in the eastern Byzantine empire and the nation-states of Europe—and, moreover, continues to do so in the Roman law courses taken by many students today.
RELATED HISTORIES
3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES
ULPIAN
170–228 CE
Roman jurist who advised emperors of the early third century CE
JUSTINIAN I
ca. 482–565 CE
Byzantine Roman emperor (527–565 CE)
30-SECOND TEXT
Matthew Nicholls
Law and the principle of justice are among Rome’s greatest achievements, which served the republic and empire, and continued into European legal systems of the Middle Ages and beyond.
