Book Guide

A breath-taking spectacle confronted any traveller in the first four centuries of our era as he approached the city of Rome. A vast number of houses, great palaces, temples, public buildings, monuments and shrines, of a splendour and magnificence with which no other city in the then known world could compare, stretched as far as the eye could see.

Throughout that long time for nearly two centuries previously as well, Rome had been the chief city in the western world, continuously enriched by the spoils of war, by tribute and by vast profits which came from controlling the destinies of other lands and peoples. It was the centre of the Roman Empire and of civilisation. The wealth of some of its rich men and of its rulers was fabulous. Much though they lavished upon the elegance, luxury and adornment of their homes; freely though they indulged in any whim and in every imaginable extravagance; largely though they were forced to spend upon a misplaced charity to sustain and amuse vast feckless mobs of idle poor, many of them nevertheless spared much also of their fortunes to embellish the city itself.

At the outset, the great difficult at once occurs of deciding which particular period the story should relate. Just as nobody would try to describe the vanished everyday life in London without deciding whether to take the London of the Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, Hanoverians or Victorians, so it would be impossible to give even a tolerably adequate impression of everyday life in ancient Rome without relating it either to the early primitive days of the Kings in the fifth century B.C. and of the Founding Fathers of the Republic in the heroic days of the fourth, third and second centuries B.C., or to the later time of troubles during the fierce civil wars of the first century B.C., or to that long period of the four succeeding centuries of the Roman Emperors, the great period when the might of Rome rose to ever new heights only to weaken in the third and fourth centuries and to collapse irrevocably in the fifth century A.D. On whatever period we try to concentrate the limelight through the mist of the ages, the scene will always be found to shift and change. Much as the Romans liked to think of Rome as something fixed and eternal, they were increasingly conscious of these changes which as time went on, the more reflective among them found more and more reasons to deplore. The story is of such perennial fascination that nothing less than an outline of it as a whole, however sketchy, will be attempted here.

These brief indications may serve to show the settings and the limits of the account here attempted of the main qualities or features of everyday life in Ancient Rome, as it developed from the rustic simplicity of the farmer-soldiers of the early Republic down to the sophistication which flourished, as never before, in a heyday of glory under the Antonine Emperors in the second century of our era.

By continually glancing backwards and forwards in this way, it should be possible to savour something of the changing quality of Roman life, and to realise the full meaning of such well-worn proverbial sayings as 'Rome was not built in a day' and of Virgil's much-quoted line about the epic achievements of his countrymen:

Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem
'So vast a toil it was to found the State of Rome.'

F. R. COWELL
January 1961

From the Preface

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F. R. Cowell

F. R. Cowell

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D. Stredder Bist

D. Stredder Bist

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