Does the Early Roman Principate (27 BC–AD 96) Sound Familiar? Part Four

Victor Davis Hanson

After Domitian, some forty or more of the successive emperors were not Italian born. Most came from the Balkans or North Africa. The Western Empire was slowly eclipsed by the wealth of eastern provinces.

But everywhere too much money predominated in the Neronian Age. Imported woods, gilt, and marble were the preferred building materials in vast mansions with hordes of slave attendants, such as Nero’s Golden House, or the Cave Canem residence of Trimalchio.

Coastal homes had innovative air conditioning created by drilling tunnels out to the sea. Long piers were especially prized, along with vast mosaic floors. The “help” was often damned, as slaves were portrayed as sneaky, conniving, duplicitous, sexually compliant, and corrupting.

References in the literature to the abodes of the rich are akin to the “mansions” stories in the Wall Street Journal—unaffordable to any but the .001 percent, but intriguing to readers by their very indulgence.

Murders, violent assaults, and robberies were seen as common on the streets. So were fires and building collapses. Our reeking streets in San Francisco where the homeless inject, urinate, fornicate, and defecate publicly remind us of what Juvenal wrote of the new Rome.

There were no autopens, but plenty of stories of forging seals and signatures on wills. Conniving slaves, freedmen, and heirs vied to con the rich inheritances of often childless plutocrats (see the Croton of Petronius). Remember this was a century of a shrinking, aging elite. The impression is that there is a fading middle class and the best way to get rich, is to find an inheritance, especially in the new age of liberated wealthy women.

There was no Botox, but only tons of toxic white lead creams and mercury-derived powders.

Travel over the Mediterranean was deemed unpredictable and dangerous, if not deadly given the incompetence of some pilots and fraud of shipowners, similar to the increasing public fear of airports and flying.

So, overshadowing these eight decades were the realities of a crashing fertility rate, the end of small farming and agrarianism, not much worry about the distant protectors in the legions who kept the borders secure but otherwise were forgotten about, and the influxes of Northern Europeans, Africans, and Middle Easterners into Italy both as slaves and freedmen.

The vast importation of slaves and money from foreign wars transformed the small farms of Italy into vast corporate estates or latifundia of absentee owners and slave laborers—and especially devoted to viticulture for winemaking.

Grain from North Africa and Egypt needed to be imported by the tons to Rome, given the Italian switch to vineyards and orchards—and due to the unemployed, volatile mobs of Rome who relied on the grain dole.

“Bread and circuses” alone supposedly kept them quiet, and the idea of slashing the dole was synonymous with riot and insurrection. (I once was in a large Fresno supermarket, when the public address system announced that only credit cards, checks, and cash could be accepted for the next few hours while they worked on their machines that processed EBT and WIC welfare cards. Within a minute, three-quarters of the shopping crowd, simply abandoned their full carts and stormed furiously out the door.)

Oddy, Roman critics felt the decline and decadence and suggested it was unstoppable. Tacitus in his Agricola makes a tribal British chieftain Calgacus say of Roman imperialism “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”

Livy lamented the new wealth and decadence: “We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies needed to cure them.”

Juvenal saw correctly that it is hard not to give in to the appetites when peace and prosperity marry freedom and unleash the material desires: “Now do we suffer the evils of prolonged peace; luxury more ruthless than the sword broods over us, and avenges a conquered world.”

Even earlier Catullus could envision the future decadence and luxury that the empire would bring to tottering Republican Italy: “Leisure, Catullus, is trouble for you: In leisure you become overjoyed and too passionate: Leisure has destroyed kings before. And blessed cities.”

And yet the empire survived the Julio-Claudian and Flavian for another 400 years. As the philosophers assured us, there is a lot of rot in a nation before it collapses.