A TikTok meme has been trending lately where a woman asks some man in her life, “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” He then reveals that he thinks about it more than is decent. Laugher ensues. Mary Beard’s tongue-in-cheek and very patronizing suggestion is that it gives modern men “a safe space for being macho in.” Certainly, at least part of the humor does seem to come from the idea that our basically harmless fella is fantasizing about doing guilt-free hyper-guy things like genociding people, roasting dormice, minting coins and requisitioning African grain.
The meme has been annoying me a little, though, because I think about ancient Rome a lot too and I’m not a man, nor do I fantasize about actually being there in person and participating. In fact, it is literally impossible for me to imagine having a good time in Rome. If I didn’t die in infancy I’d be a sleep-deprived kitchen slave who died in illegitimate childbirth. My corpse would be thrown out on the city outskirts and a stray dog would pick up my hand and jog along with it to the forum, the closest I’d ever get to any political action. Even if I’m not the imaginery protagonist, though, it’s still interesting to think about Rome.
My idea of the Roman Empire changes substantially every time I go to a museum and see another object that confronts me with the fact that these were real people who had pretty strange ways of doing things. So far I’ve been to six museums: Palazzo Massimo, the Capitoline museums, Palazzo Altemps, the Diocletian Baths, the Giovanni Barracco Museum of Ancient Sculpture, and the Museo Centrale Montemartini. Here are some of the objects that caught my eye.
A Slave Collar
I totally knew that Rome was a slave economy. But after years of reading how well Cicero treated his secretary, that slaves could ‘earn’ their freedom and that ‘in general they were well treated’ because slave owners considered them private property (so it wouldn’t make sense to mistreat them), it was a shock to see this.
“I have run away; hold me. When you have brought me back to my master Zoninus, you will receive a gold coin.”
An Oil Lamp
When Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., two people fled the town carrying nothing but two items: a key and an oil lamp. The key probably fitted to a chest where they’d locked up their possessions against looting. The lamp was in the shape of an African head and may have helped a little to find their way through the darkness under the towering the ash cloud. They didn’t make it very far beyond the city’s outskirts before they were overcome.
An Ivory Doll
The night before a girl’s wedding (which usually happened in her mid-to-late teens but sometimes as young as twelve), she enacted a ceremony of putting away her childish things, dedicating her toys to the household gods. This expensive doll with articulated limbs belonged to Crepereia, who died before the age of 20 and was buried together with her owner. The doll even had its own little ‘trousseau’, a wooden chest containing little golden combs.
A Funeral Bed
An exquisite ivory bed, probably crafted in Alexandria, was used to carry a body in a funeral procession. An elite Roman funeral was not just a ceremony to mourn the dead but also an occasion to increase the visibility and prestige of the family. Male relatives would have carried the bier through the streets to a site outside the city walls. Professional female mourners would have accompanied the bier crying, moaning, tearing their hair, scratching their faces and ripping their clothes. Musicians would have been playing sombre music. The family’s ancestors would be represented in effigy or by actors wearing their death-masks, giving the impression they had come back to life. When the procession reached the necopolis outside the city, the bier and its contents were laid on a pyre. A eulogy was delivered, and then the pyre was set alight. When the body was cremated, the ashes and remnants of charred ivory were carefully gathered up and put in an urn.
A Water Pump
Who fears, or ever feared, the collapse of his house in cool
Praeneste, or rural Gabii, or Tivoli perched on its hillside,
or Volsinii, nestling amid its woodland ridges? But here
we inhabit a city largely shored up with gimcrack
stays and props: that’s how our landlords postpone slippage,
and—after masking great cracks in the ancient fabric—assure
the tenants they can sleep sound, when the house is tottering.
Myself, I prefer life without fires, and without nocturnal panics.
(Juvenal, Satire 3.190–197)
Rome was very vulnerable to fire, partly because of overcrowding, poor building standards and the use of braziers for heating and cooking. Augustus created a fire-brigade in 6 CE, a group of slaves called the Vigiles Urbani (City Watchmen) but their power to stop fires was limited. They used buckets of water to throw at the flames and axes to tear down nearby structures to stop the fire spreading. Some of them also used water pumps like the one below.
A Stamped Pipe
“This segment of lead pipe fed the domus of Titus Flavius Claudius Claudianus, the water licensee. Was found on the Quirinal Hill in 1878, within the Pallavicini Rospigliosi Gardens during the construction of the Via Nazionale. Claudius Claudianus, who embarked on a senatorial career under the Emperors Commodus and Septimius Servus, was also engaged in profitable collateral activities, such as the luxury goods trade with Alexandria as the owner of ships serving the [Cura] Annona (supplies for Rome). As the owner of land in the Campania area, he was also involved in the production of wine.”
–From the caption at Museo Centrale Montemartini
Incidentally, Cura Annona, or ‘Care of Annona’ was the term for the import and distribution of grain to the residents of the cities of Rome (and later to Constantinople). Annona was the name of the goddess representing the concept of the grain supply, sort of a lesser or more city-specific version of Ceres. Rome imported all its grain, mainly from northern Africa, and distributed it free or at a subsidy to a substantial portion of its citizens (200,000 adult males in the second century CE, out of a population of about one million).
An Election Cup
One thing I’ve learned from reading Mary Beard’s book SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome is that the Romans were very serious about self-promotion, marketing and propaganda. This is one example of that. A candidate’s supporters would stand on the street giving out food to the poor. When the potential voter had food in his belly and was presumably feeling warmly towards his donor, he could look at the bottom of the bowl and see the candidate’s name scratched in the bottom.
A Curse Tablet
If you had a gripe with someone and couldn’t get face-to-face satisfaction, there were more indirect and magical means. The usual procedure was to take a very thin sheet of lead, scratch text onto it, roll it up and either bury it, throw it in a well or pool, or nail it to the wall of a temple. There was probably some ritual involved, possibly an incantation and gestures. Sometimes the curse would be addressed to one of the deities of the Underworld and sometimes you would provide some physical ‘essence’ of the person, for example a hair or fingernail. In the example below, the tablet simply has the person’s name (written twice).
Styluses
The Romans didn’t have paper. Important documents were written in ink on papyrus or parchment made from animal skin. For day-to-day writing, though, they used a couple of wooden planks bound together and covered with wax. They then wrote on the wax with sharp metal sticks called styluses. When they wanted to create a ‘clean slate’, they smoothed the wax (tabula rasa literally means ‘cleared tablet’). This method of writing was already quite ancient by Augustus’ period; a 14th-century BCE boxwood tablet was found on the Uluburun shipwreck.
The Hand of Panthea
The hand was connected to the cult of Sabazios, a Thracian god, which in the Roman Empire had become loosely connected to Jupiter. He is always shown on horseback wielding a staff of power and sometimes killing a snake (some of these images were later altered to represent St. George killing a wormy looking dragon).
A ritual object, the hand was attached to poles in processions or placed in temples or household altars.
It’s probably hard to see in this photo, but this particular hand includes the following symbols: a snake, a pine cone, a small bust of Hermes (Mercury), a ram’s head, a vase, a tiny insect, a pair of scales, a turtle, a frog, the winged caduceus of Mercury, and a lizard. The symbols seem (though noone really knows) to be connected with themes of regeneration. Mercury had the divine role of accompanying souls; a pine cone represented fertility; a frog stood for metamorphosis; a lizard for regeneration.
So, there you have it. Yes, the Roman Empire was macho, but it was also dangerous, weird, vibrant, superficial, highly flammable and diverse! There is plenty for everyone to think about.
