Leisured Resistance: Villas, Literature and Politics in the Roman World 9781472595768, 9780715634899

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For my brothers Robert, Stephen and Neil

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Abbreviations

Aus., Mos.

Ausonius, Mosella

Cic., Att.

Cicero, Epistulae ad Atticum (‘Letters to Atticus’)

Cic., Fam.

Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares (‘Letters to his Friends’)

Cic., Leg.

Cicero, De Legibus (‘On the Laws’)

Cic., Off.

Cicero, De Officiis (‘On Duties’)

Cic., Tusc.

Cicero, The Tusculan Disputations

Hor., Carm.

Horace, Carmina (‘Poems’ or ‘Odes’)

Hor., Ep.

Horace, Epistulae (‘Letters’)

Hor., Sat.

Horace, Satires (their traditional name in English, though Horace calls them Sermones, ‘Conversations’)

Juv., Sat.

Juvenal, Satires

Plin., Nat. Hist.

Pliny the Elder, The Natural History

Plin., Ep.

Pliny the Younger, Epistulae (‘Letters’)

Plut., Cic.

Plutarch, The Life of Cicero

Sal., Cat.

Sallust, The Conspiracy of Catiline

Sen., Ep.

Seneca the Younger, Epistulae Morales

Sid., Carm.

Sidonius Apollinaris, Carmina (‘Poems’)

Sid., Ep.

Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistulae (‘Letters’)

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Abbreviations

Stat., Silv.

Statius, Silvae (‘Woods’, with the secondary meaning ‘timber’, ‘raw material’)

Suet., Aug.

Suetonius, The Life of Augustus

Suet., Cal.

Suetonius The Life of Gaius Caligula

Suet., Claud.

Suetonius, The Life of Claudius

Suet., Dom.

Suetonius, The Life of Domitian

Suet., Nero

Suetonius, The Life of Nero

Symm., Ep.

Symmachus, Epistulae (‘Letters’)

Tac., Ann.

Tacitus, Annales (‘Annals’, ‘Year-by-Year Historical Record’)

Tac., Hist.

Tacitus, Histories

ix

Ven. Fort., Carm. Venantius Fortunatus, Carmina (‘Poems’)

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Chronology

bc 58 48 44 43 27 bc–ad 14 23 c. 20

Cicero abandoned by Pompey the Great and exiled from Rome by Clodius Battle of Pharsalus Death of Julius Caesar Death of Cicero Reign of Augustus The first three books of Horace’s Carmina complete The first book of Horace’s Epistulae complete

ad 14–37 37–41 41–54 54–68 59 64 65 68 68–9 69–79 79 79–81

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Reign of Tiberius Reign of Gaius Caligula Reign of Claudius Reign of Nero Death of Agrippina the Younger, mother of Nero Great Fire of Rome Discovery of the Conspiracy of Piso, and the deaths of Seneca the Younger and Lucan Death of Nero and end of the Julio–Claudian dynasty Civil war. Reigns of Galba, Otho and Vitellius Reign of Vespasian Eruption of Vesuvius, destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and death of Pliny the Elder Reign of Titus

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Chronology

81–96 80–c. 102 90 c. 92–6 96–8 98–117 100 c. 110–c. 112 117–38 c. 110–c. 130 c. 114–c. 120 364–75 c. 371 375 379 410 468 c. 469–c. 482 c. 470 474 c. 486 565–c. 600

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Reign of Domitian Martial writes the Liber Spectaculorum and 14 books of other Epigrams Statius’ victory at the Alban Games held at Domitian’s villa (March) Statius’ visit to the villa of Pollius Felix (August) Statius writes the Silvae Reign of Nerva Reign of Trajan, ‘Best of Princes’ Pliny the Younger, appointed consul, delivers the Panegyricus in honour of Trajan Pliny the Younger governor of Bithynia-Pontus Reign of Hadrian Suetonius writes the Lives of the Caesars Juvenal writes the Satires Tacitus writes the Annals Reign of Valentinian I Ausonius writes Mosella Symmachus writes to his father about Bauli (Ep. 1. 1) Ausonius appointed consul by Gratian Rome sacked by Alaric the Goth Sidonius Apollinaris appointed Prefect of the City of Rome Sidonius writes the Epistulae Sidonius consecrated Bishop of Auvergne (with his seat in the city of Clermont) Clermont captured, after repeated sieges, by Euric, king of the Goths, and Sidonius imprisoned Death of Sidonius Career of Venantius Fortunatus in Gaul

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aCknowledgements

I am grateful first and foremost to Tom Harrison, who invited me to contribute to the series in which this book appears, and whose kindness, along with his patience, ought to have been rewarded with more timely results. I am similarly grateful for the remarkable patience of Deborah Blake, as also to the anonymous reader who assessed the original proposal for Duckworth and responded to it with great generosity. I continued to enjoy support and professionalism beyond anything I could claim to deserve when the project came under the aegis of Bloomsbury, and I am glad to record my gratitude to Charlotte Loveridge, Dhara Patel, and Matthew Porter. A second anonymous reader made a number of suggestions that have improved the first version, and also merits my thanks for giving me license to put back in some material and items of bibliography that had at first been omitted for the sake of economy. At Fakenham Prepress Solutions Kim Storry and Martyn Oliver have been models of efficiency, taking in their stride not only my wayward orthography but also the risk that the proofs might have been held up by jury duty. The University of Toronto granted me the sabbatical leave in which the bulk of the necessary preparation and the reading was done. Alison Keith spoke some much-needed words of good sense and encouragement when I had begun to think I would have to give up. Further welcome reassurance came from Damien Nelis, who kindly read the first and last chapters. To Valéry Berlincourt and Manuela Wullschleger I owe some precious bibliographical and archaeological information. My thanks to them all. Cicero and Pliny could find refuge from their daily cares in the luxurious villas they owned in the hills and along the coasts of Italy and Gaul. I have often found some refuge from my own daily cares much closer to home, at the Bishop and the Belcher on Bloor Street East, Toronto; only the friendly and ever-welcoming owners and

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staff can guess how much of this book was conceived, and how much of its wording was crafted, at Table Nine. My other places of refuge in recent years have been a house on the campus of Keele University and an apartment complex near the Parque Eduardo VII in Lisbon; to Sarah Graham, Jonathan Healey, and Freddie, and to Edgardo Medeiros da Silva, I am indebted for all the gifts that friendship brings and, indeed, for more than half my happiness. As for the dedicatees, this particular gift of my own is given with a brother’s love. I could say more, but they’d only poke fun.

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1 Cicero and the Generals: Living the Life of Laertes

Pompey ‘the Great’ was given his nickname by the dictator Sulla to honour a series of striking victories in Sicily and Africa in the civil war against the populist champion Marius. Even at the time there must have been some who suspected Sulla of a certain degree of irony towards a pushy young man on the way up, as Pompey was demanding that he should be allowed to march through Rome with his armies in a triumph to which, having never yet held an elected magistracy, he was not legally entitled. If so, however, Pompey won the retrospective right to the name of greatness by virtue of his many later achievements: no right-thinking Roman could fail to see the value of adding a large tract of Asia Minor and the Near East to the Republic’s conquests, of storming with an entourage into the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem in order to see what all the fuss was about, or of sweeping the seas clear of pirates to make commerce safe for the landed and entrepreneurial classes while once more contenting the poorest citizens of Rome with cheap bread. With honour and high office there came occasional vexation of spirit, but when he needed to escape the pressures of partisan politics in those troubled times, the Great One could retreat for a short vacation to his country estate in the Alban hills, a comfortable day’s journey to the south-east of the city. The first century before Christ was a time of upheaval in the Roman state, and, while treasured enmities could be counted upon to endure, friendships were more easily sacrificed to political

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expediency. Pompey had found the distinguished orator and statesman Cicero a useful ally, and particularly benefited from his oratory when Cicero delivered an eloquent speech, the Pro Lege Manilia (‘On the Manilian Law’), endorsing the grant of sole command to Pompey in the prestigious, and lucrative, campaign against King Mithradates VI of Pontus. Even so, when it became necessary to accommodate himself to the growing power of Julius Caesar, Pompey also had to cultivate good relations with Caesar’s associate, the aristocratic thug Clodius; Clodius had a longstanding vendetta against Cicero; and Cicero therefore had to be dropped, or at least kept at arm’s length. Cicero’s biographer Plutarch (Cic. 31) tells us that when, in 58 bc, Clodius brought a legal action against Cicero with a view to driving him into exile, Pompey, in embarrassment, removed himself from the scene and went off to his Alban villa so as to escape from Cicero’s pleas for intervention. The distance was not great, but, in an age in which nothing moved faster on land than a horse, it was great enough to prevent daily importuning. The situation for Cicero was desperate, however, and his son-in-law Piso trudged out to appeal for help. Pompey seems to have prevaricated. Cicero therefore made the journey himself. Rather than face the man he was treating so shabbily, Pompey gathered his greatness around him like a cloak, and slipped out the back door. The slaves were perhaps instructed to inform Cicero with regret that the master was busy somewhere else on the estate, or visiting a neighbour a number of miles away, and would not return for some time. Out in the country it may have been easier to pull this off, but the dodge could prove useful in the city too. A century later we find Seneca the Younger complaining (De Brevitate Vitae (‘On the Shortness of Life’) 14. 4) that ‘many men’ seek to avoid the crowds of troublesome dependants clogging their atria, the public parts of upper-class Roman townhouses that were thrown open during the day to all and sundry. They make off through doors in dark and obscure parts of the house not accessible to their social inferiors and petitioners, ‘as if’, adds Seneca tartly, ‘it were not unkinder to trick them than to lock them out in the first place’. In a verse epistle to the distinguished aristocratic barrister Manlius Torquatus (Ep. 1. 5) we also find Horace inviting this particularly grand friend of his to a relaxed private dinner and positively encouraging his addressee to ‘cheat with the backdoor’s help the

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client keeping watch upon the hallway’. The poem makes it clear, however, that the next day is a public holiday, in honour of the Emperor Augustus’ birthday, and a client whose manners are so bad that he encroaches on the dinner hour so late on such a day is perhaps asking for it. The need for high-ranking public officials, and the rich and powerful in general, to find some way of erecting barriers between their private and public lives is a recurrent theme in Roman literature of many kinds. In the time of the emperors, however, even the richest Roman with the largest number of supplicants seeking his attention and favour was in his turn dependent on the favour of the greatest of all patrons, Caesar himself. Where Caesar was absent, a degree of freedom, or the illusion of freedom, was easier to maintain. The country estate not only continued to offer something of the practical utility that Pompey exploited, but could also be presented, through the conscious fashioning of a complex and varied literary tradition, as a private place where political activities were suspended, or perhaps as a private state immune from the realities of stifling or even despotic power as exercised in the capital. Horace occupies a particularly important place in this tradition. In the poem to Manlius Torquatus he appears to imagine himself as being in Rome, and Torquatus is being invited to come for dinner late in the day, after he has finished pleading a case and has had his bath, with the assurance that he can then sleep late on the following holiday. There is, at any rate, no suggestion that he is expected to make a journey of several hours out into the country.1 Much more prevalent in Horace’s poetry is the theme of escape from the city entirely, out to his ‘farm’ in the Sabine hills above Tibur (Tivoli), or as far as the vacation pleasure-town of Baiae on the Bay of Naples or, even further away to the south and east, Tarentum on the Apulian coast. The locus classicus is the 29th poem of the third book of his Carmina (‘Odes’), addressed to his patron Maecenas, the trusted advisor of the Emperor Augustus. Maecenas is encouraged to lay aside for a while the cares of government, and to leave Rome, where from his palatial suburban garden-estate on the Esquiline hill he can look out across the Roman Campagna to Tibur and imagine what he is missing. Rome is presented in ambiguous terms, as a place of opulence and activity, but also of trouble and hubbub (Carm. 3. 29. 9–12):

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Abandon the plenty that makes a man blasé And your massive pile that approaches the lofty clouds: Leave off gazing in wonder at The smoke and wealth and din of heaven-blessed Rome Horace knows that Maecenas has been occupied with the highest concerns of statecraft, with the question of what political arrangements will best preserve political stability, and how to keep Rome safe from the machinations of foreign powers (Carm. 3. 29. 25–8). The core of Horace’s advice is that well-deserved rest is to be found in rural simplicity and friendship, enjoyed with the wisdom that accepts the limits of man’s power to foretell the future and takes each day as it comes. Traditional Roman ideas about the ethical superiority of the country over the town blend, broadly speaking, with Epicurean notions of contentment with simple pleasures and happiness in seclusion and retreat, a mix we shall see again and again in the literature of the Roman villa. Here, however, there is an added potency because so much is at stake. Robin Nisbet and Niall Rudd are surely right to see in the reference to Maecenas’ occupation with political arrangements an allusion to the role he played in ‘the deliberations that led to the settlement of 23 bc, by which Augustus based his rule on imperium proconsulare and tribunicia potestas’.2 This is no routine business, then, and Maecenas has been engaged in the creation of the constitutional monarchy, or perhaps we should say the grand bargain between the emperor and the aristocracy, that would rule the Roman Empire for the next two centuries. Maecenas, of course, had villas of his own to which he could escape if the pressure was too much, but Horace invites him to the very estate that Maecenas had given him, a gift by which he secured for Horace the relative independence that enabled his life as a poet. It is also an estate temptingly close to the city – less than 30 miles away – and hence easy to get to, and easy to get back from if duty required it. High politics and Greek philosophy join with the tradition of the invitation poem and Horace’s own gratitude to create ‘the most memorable statement of his thoughts about friendship and life’.3 It is all a far cry from the negation of both personal and political friendship that Cicero encountered when he turned up, uninvited and undesired, at Pompey’s door on the Alban estate.

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This powerful validation of friendship and public duty, and of the concomitant wisdom of knowing how – and where – they could be balanced with honour and sanity alike, is flexible enough for later writers to adapt in sometimes quite surprising ways. Horace himself will sometimes talk of his detachment from wealth and affairs of state in terms that are highly idealised (Carm. 3. 1. 45–8): Why should I toil to build in the modern style A lofty hallway with a door to inspire envy? Why should I exchange my Sabine valley For wealth that brings more trouble? At others he is refreshingly aware of how lazy and self-indulgent it all might seem to those looking on. As he says to another correspondent, Albius (Ep. 1. 4. 15–16): Be sure to come and see me when you fancy a laugh, Fat and shiny with my well cared-for hide, a porker from Epicurus’ herd. The modern age, or at any rate the contemporary academy, seems to find Horace hard to like, complaining of what can appear to be a mix of self-importance, parasitical self-indulgence, casual misogyny and intermittent pomposity. Other Roman authors, on the other hand, seem to have responded to his subtlety, his complexity, his variety, and the richness of his vision of the life of friendship and pleasure, of the renunciation of crass ambition, that distils to perfection much of what Romans admired both about themselves and about the Hellenistic culture that Rome had become by the time of Augustus. Tibur and the Alban hills were favoured locations for vacation villas in part because their cool hilltops provided a refuge from the fierce heat of the Roman summer – as well as from the risk of disease that came with the summer heat – and in part because they were none the less close enough to the city to permit a quick return if it was needed. Emperors took property in the area too, the most famous example being the vast villa of Hadrian at Tibur. Domitian preferred the Alban hills further south, and the mighty structures that some scholars imagine were built for him by his favourite architect Rabirius may actually have incorporated the very villa

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where Cicero failed to find Pompey at home. The extensive ruins, at any rate, now lie under Castel Gandolfo, where the Popes have long had their summer residence. Some upper-class Romans preferred the seaside. Perhaps the best-known surviving literary depiction of a luxury estate is Pliny’s famous account of his villa on the coast of Latium at Laurentum (Ep. 2. 17), one of whose most attractive amenities was a dining room that projected from the house so that its front and sides offered a triple view of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Further along the coast but also handy for Rome was Antium (Anzio). Suetonius tells us that both the Emperor Gaius (Caligula) and his nephew the Emperor Nero were born there, and though he does not say so explicity, it seems likely that this will have been at a private villa forming part of the property of the imperial family, the Julii. Tacitus, at any rate, mentions ‘the estate at Antium’ (Ann. 14. 3) which Agrippina the Younger, Gaius’ sister and Nero’s mother, would sometimes visit. Suetonius also tells us that Gaius loved Antium so much that he preferred it to all other retreats and was reported to have declared that he intended to move the capital of the empire there. For Suetonius this was no doubt further evidence of the same perversity of taste and wilful megalomania that led Gaius to proclaim Virgil a poet of no talent and very little education, but Nero, too, honoured their birthplace and founded a formal colony there, which he populated with veterans from the imperial Praetorian Guard. It was also while Nero was staying at Antium that he received the news of the great fire that broke out in the July of ad 64 and reduced most of the centre of the capital to ashes. Nero’s fondness for the sea and for the places associated with his childhood is also attested to by the historian Tacitus, to whom we owe the information that he greatly loved to visit the Bay of Naples, in particular the north side around Puteoli (Pozzuoli) and Misenum (Ann. 15. 51). Tacitus also tells us that Nero regularly celebrated the springtime festival of Minerva, the Quinquatrus, in the middle of March, at Baiae, the epitome of villa-centred luxury and the life of ease (Ann. 14. 4). He will no doubt have been very familiar with his mother’s villa in the area, even before he arranged to have her killed there. This particular villa is unusually well documented in the Roman literary tradition, and worth considering in some detail for what

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it reveals about the intersection between literature, the aristocratic ideal of otium, and dangerous high politics. Its name was Bauli, and, though its precise location remains disputed, the growing consensus is that it lay on the north coast of the Bay, between Baiae to the north and the peninsula of Cape Misenum to the south, and that it has probably left a trace of its name in the little community of Bacoli. It was owned in the last century of the Republic by Cicero’s great courtroom rival, the orator and lawyer Hortensius, whom Cicero compliments by making it the setting for the second book of his Academica Priora (‘Earlier Writings on Academic Scepticism’), a learned philosophical discussion of theories of knowledge. It was also the setting for less elevated activities, not least Hortensius’ passion for rearing fish as delicacies for the table, and in his vast encyclopedia, the Natural History (9. 172), Pliny the Elder remarks that Hortensius grew so attached to one particular murena (probably a kind of moray eel) that he was said to have shed tears on learning of its death. The fishponds at Bauli were familiar to the polymath Varro, who notes that he knew them from his frequent visits to the villa (Res Rusticae (‘On Agriculture’) 3. 17. 5). It seems somehow to have come into the property of the imperial family, as Pliny also notes that Antonia, the wife of Drusus, similarly had a favourite murena, and that hers became something of a tourist attraction because she kitted it out with golden earrings. There were no grander ladies in ancient Rome than Antonia. She was the daughter of Mark Antony and Augustus’ sister Octavia. The first Roman emperor, Augustus, was therefore her maternal uncle; the second, Tiberius, was her brother-in-law; the third, Gaius Caligula, was her grandson; the fourth, Claudius, was her younger son; and the fifth, and last of the dynasty, Nero, was her great-grandson. Bauli may even have been her own personal property, and it certainly seems to have been owned in her own right by her granddaughter Agrippina the Younger, Nero’s mother, if we take Tacitus literally (‘her own villa’; Ann. 14. 5). It provides the setting for one of the most dramatic scenes in Roman historical writing, the account of Nero’s matricide. Tacitus relates (Ann. 14. 1–9) how the young emperor grew to resent with a murderous passion his mother’s domination and how he made a lurid attempt to disguise assassination as calamitous accident. He did so by enticing her to Baiae with a pretence of reconciliation

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and then, after a great show of filial affection at a well-attended dinner party, sending her home to Bauli in a carefully contrived deathtrap. The ship she sailed in had been so fashioned that a canopy, or perhaps a cabin ceiling, weighted with lead could be brought crashing down on those below. The plan misfired, and the crew scuttled the ship with the intention of covering up the crime. The drama gathered pace when Agrippina’s companion Acerronia tried to attract help by crying out that she was the princess, at which point she was bludgeoned to death with oars by sailors terrified of the consequences of the illustrious and wellconnected victim’s survival. Agrippina somehow succeeded in swimming to shore, and headed back to Bauli. Collecting her wits and examining the facts, she came to two conclusions: first, that this was no accident, and, second, that the safest thing to do was to pretend that it was. She therefore sent word to Nero that she was safe, and assured him that, though of course she knew he would be greatly alarmed, there was no need for him to come in person. Nero was thrown into panic, but an emergency meeting with his chief advisers Burrus and Seneca restored something of his calm and determination to see the thing through. Anicetus, admiral of the imperial fleet stationed at Misenum just to the south of Bauli, was entrusted with the grim business of completing the botched job in the small hours of the night. In a sinister scene Tacitus shows us Anicetus surrounding with guards the villa where, in happier days, Cicero and Hortensius had discussed philosophy and Agrippina’s grandmother had adorned her pet, breaking into the house, and then heading with two other naval officers for the bedroom of the dowager empress. Agrippina tried to take charge of the situation through a mix of bluff and defiance, but her assailants moved in and surrounded her sleeping-couch. One hit her on the head with a club, and another prepared to strike with his sword. Romans of her illustrious ancestry and exalted station in life were expected to meet death with courage and epigram, and the Julii had a record of living up to expectations. She pointed to the womb that had conceived her murderous son, and gave the centurion of the marines a fresh order: ‘Strike me in the belly.’ It is fine, rollicking stuff, drama of the highest quality; and if we can enjoy it, there must have been even more of a pleasurable thrill in it for the élite Romans who were Tacitus’ primary readership. They will have had no great difficulty in picturing the scene, or in savouring the horror

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that went with the thought of so terrible a crime being committed in a place associated with family and childhood memories. Some of them will have had seaside villas of their own, and some of those will have been in the vicinity of Bauli. Or perhaps we could even imagine Pliny the Younger, Tacitus’ friend and correspondent, reading the gripping account while on vacation at Laurentum. We hear of Bauli again some three centuries later. Under Christian emperors and in a time when those emperors lived far from Rome, in Trier, hard by the borders of unconquered Germany, or in Constantinople, some Roman aristocrats took care to nurture the memory of old traditions. The ancient pagan culture of the days when Hortensius and Cicero enjoyed the life of otium, of well-earned cultivated leisure spent in the study of literature and philosophy remote from the worldly cares of Rome and daily political struggles, had not lost its meaning for them, nor its cultural prestige. They hoped and believed that it could still thrive, in lofty patrician defiance of bishops and barbarians alike. One of the richest and most precious sources of information about this class, and about how it saw the changing world around it, is the correspondence of Symmachus, a distinguished senator from a distinguished family, who held a succession of high offices in the imperial administration, as proconsular governor of Africa, as Prefect of the City of Rome, and as consul. Symmachus was a prominent leader among those aristocrats whose devotion to Roman tradition entailed resistance to the newly established state religion of Christianity. To modern readers he is best known for an eloquent letter (Relatio 3) to the Emperor Valentinian II in which he argued for religious toleration in general and, more particularly, for the restoration of the Altar of the goddess Victory to its old place of honour in the Senate House. It had stood there from the days of Augustus until it was removed on the orders of Valentinian’s half-brother and predecessor, Gratian; like Gratian the young emperor preferred to heed the advice of Ambrose, the fierce bishop of Milan, and Symmachus’ appeal was unsuccessful. The collection of Symmachus’ letters as we have it appears to have been arranged and published after his death by his son Memmius, but the personality of the author and his ideals emerge clearly enough. He draws on the epistolary tradition exemplified in Rome’s glory days by Pliny the Younger to reveal something of both his public and his private lives and to make a claim thereby

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on both the respect of the reader and the honour of his peers. The collection begins with a letter (Ep. 1. 1) written about ad 375 to his father when he was in his mid-thirties and had begun to justify the high expectations of his family. He had recently returned from his tour of duty as governor in Africa and was, it seems, enjoying his well-earned rest on the Bay of Naples. He expresses the opinion that there is pleasure to be had in offering an account of one’s leisure time as well as of one’s handling of public affairs, thus reasserting, even as he for a moment dissolves it, the all-important distinction in the minds of his class between otium and negotium, between time spent honourably in leisure pursuits of a culturally superior kind that enrich the individual and time given honourably to the affairs of the state, of family, and of dependants. When it was the turn of otium to fill his days, he had the use of more than one estate in the area, and in the letter he tells his father that he is now at his place by the Lucrine Lake, having just come from Bauli. The letter is a parade of learning, but not an oppressive one, designed as it is to show Symmachus’ modest delight in his surroundings and his joy in sharing the culture and memories tied up with them. Even his observation about offering equally full reports on his otium and his negotium alludes gracefully to a dictum of Cato the Censor from half a millennium before. It may be that Symmachus knew directly the work from which it came, Cato’s Origines (‘Origins’), the first attested history of Rome written in Latin. Then again, he may, like us, have known it only second hand, from Cicero’s quotation in one of his speeches (Pro Plancio (‘In Defence of Plancius’) 66). Whichever it may be, he is at any rate aligning himself with a long tradition of service to the state and of cultured leisure. The letter offers for his father’s approval or condemnation two short poems of Symmachus’ own composition, written during the visit to Bauli, the products and, in part, the justification of his otium. One provides an explanation for a trio of portraits on display at the villa, though the ‘explanation’ is also in effect a kind of riddle, as no names are supplied and the three persons in the paintings have to be identified by a reader through familiarity with their public careers and their association with the famous house where the portraits are displayed. They are Septimius Acindynus who, after a distinguished career in the imperial administration in Spain and the Diocese of the East, had been raised to the high honour of consul ordinarius in ad 340; his father-in-law,

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whose name is lost to us but who seems to have held a priesthood in his native Athens; and Acindynus’ father, a former Prefect of the City of Rome. For those who are slow on the uptake, the second, longer poem, which also concerns three worthies associated with Bauli, makes the riddle a little easier to solve. In this poem Acindynus is named and his consular rank stated explicitly, and he is identified as someone who lived out his old age here in the lovely retreat where Hortensius had once matched Cicero in eloquence. Named after him is Memmius Vitrasius Orfitus, twice Prefect of the City. The third is Symmachus himself – Orfitus’ son-in-law. In short, the poems appear to record and honour a chain of patriarchy and inheritance. It may be that Orfitus was married to Acindynus’ daughter and that this explains his connection with the villa, and it must certainly be the case that Symmachus’ own connection with it, whether through a dowry or a later inheritance, came by virtue of his marriage to Orfitus’ daugher Rusticiana. The second poem begins by identifying Bauli through a learned etymological myth. For his tenth labour, Hercules was commanded to travel to the western edge of the world and to steal the cattle of the three-headed monster Geryon. In order to drive them back to Greece he had to traverse a large portion of western Europe, and came in time to the Bay of Naples and to the beautiful site of the future villa. There he halted to rest and penned the cattle in ‘boaulia’ (‘ox-stalls’). Good Greek, Symmachus explains, was corrupted by later ages to Bauli. The myth is one sense recherché, and reminiscent of the kind of Hellenistic learning associated above all with the Aetia (‘Causes’) of Callimachus and the clever Alexandrian poets who so influenced the culture of educated Romans in the time of Catullus and Virgil. In another sense, however, it is also rather trite. Servius’ magisterial commentary on the Aeneid of Virgil – a poem that does not name Bauli – finds two opportunities to offer a brief account of the myth and the etymology (in notes on Aeneid 6. 107 and 7. 662). That commentary can be seen as more or less typical of the school annotation on the greatest of the pagan Latin poems that Symmachus and boys of his class were taught from in their youth, and familiarity with such a detail is broadly comparable to knowing a bit of Cato second hand from another standard author in the curriculum. To point this out is not to denigrate Symmachus, but to lay stress upon the importance to him of the centuries of shared learning and cultural baggage that

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made him a fit resident of this prestigious villa and a fit expositor of its glory to his readers. His otium has been well spent, and so also has that of the educated people who have studied the same authors and are reading the letter. Of pampered fish with earrings, on the other hand, and of the murder of Agrippina in what may, for all we know, have been his own wife’s bedroom, he says nothing. This delicate side-stepping of the sensational ought perhaps to give us pause whenever we are tempted to complain that nobly born writers of his age are incorrigibly self-indulgent. Although his villa has a Greek name, to account for which he offers a Greek etymological myth, and although indeed he himself had a Greek name, from the body of his surviving works it seems on balance unlikely that Symmachus knew the language well. In his day the division of early medieval Europe into Latin West and Greek East had begun. This development would surely have been a surprise to the writers of the late Republic whom Symmachus admired, as for them the social phenomenon of the luxury villa was closely bound up with Hellenistic culture. This can be seen as a quirk of history and an oddity of cultural interaction, in that the luxury villa is in essence a very Roman development for which the Greek world can offer no true parallel. The profusion of such estates in the Italy of the late Republic was made possible by the vast influx of wealth that came in no small part from the Roman imperial conquest of the Hellenistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean in the second and first centuries bc. Much of that wealth came in the form of Greek luxury – marbles, works of art, paintings and books – as well as the educated Greeks, either slaves or social dependants, who knew how to continue production within this tradition and how to interpret it to the new masters of the world. One authoritative strand of thought in modern scholarship sees the luxury villa of the time of Cicero and Caesar almost entirely as a place of excess and ostentation in which upper-class Romans could simply escape from their usual dirty struggle for political and social dominance by engaging in a form of cultural role-playing. Considering the villas that sheltered ‘in the freer atmosphere of Campania’,4 adorned with Greek-style porticoes, libraries and picture-galleries, and stuffed with often looted Greek artistic treasures, Paul Zanker argues that ‘the phenomenon of the villa was originally a kind of social safety valve’.5 He has little

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patience with any of it, and speaks in trenchant terms of how ‘the ambitious but naive Roman treated Greek culture as if it were some sort of package deal’,6 in which he and his peers could escape from the repressive, puritanical customs of their ancestors (mos maiorum) and satisfy ‘an almost pathological need for excesses of pleasure and exhibitionism’.7 He denounces their approach as essentially ‘frivolous’,8 marked by ‘vulgar display’,9 and escapist, as something intended to create ‘an alternative way of life in the private sphere’10 and running in parallel with the world of politics and public affairs but never truly integrated with it. ‘One simply became accustomed to living simultaneously in two different worlds, speaking two languages, and adopting a dual standard of ethics’.11 From debased ethics to debased politics is an easy step in Zanker’s view, just as it was in the minds of the Roman moralists. The luxury villa is thought of as marking not so much the dominance of the late Republican Roman aristocracy over the ancient Mediterranean as the self-indulgent surrender of that class to autocracy: ‘There is no doubt that the private life of luxury and aesthetic pleasures in country villas enabled an already enfeebled aristocracy to accept more easily the transition to one-man rule’.12 This has more the look of caricature than of sober historical assessment. Archaeology and the literary record tell a more nuanced story. The eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79 that destroyed Pompeii also wiped out the smaller neighbouring town of Herculaneum, a few miles further north-west along the coast of the bay. The discoveries made there include a vast and luxurious suburban villa built on a series of terraces overlooking the sea. The villa was richly decorated, and at a first look might seem typical of the kind of place that Zanker describes. Dozens of sculptures were found there, including several fine bronzes all the more precious to us because such works were often melted down for their metal in the long penurious centuries that divide us from the age of Rome. The villa, however, is most famous for being the site of the only intact library known to have been preserved from Roman antiquity, a vast collection of calcined scrolls from which comes the villa’s modern name, the ‘Villa of the Papyri’. The process of recovering and deciphering the contents of the library has been slow and painful, but the modern technique of multispectral imaging is speeding that process up. Enough has now been retrieved and published for us to see that the scrolls unearthed so

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far from the accumulation of thick-packed volcanic ash include a large collection of philosophical and technical works in Greek by the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara, while scraps of Latin poets such as Ennius and Lucretius have also been recovered. The prevailing view is that the villa was the property of the man known from Philodemus’ poetry to have been his patron, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. Piso was a political ally of Julius Caesar, whose third and last wife was Piso’s daughter Calpurnia. He was in fact one of the consuls in the very year when Cicero was exiled, and his willingness to let Cicero’s enemies prevail contributed to the scathing invective launched against him by the orator after his conviction was annulled and he was permitted to return to Rome. Cicero (In Pisonem (‘Against Piso’) 68–9) presents Piso as having found a pretext for his debaucheries in the Epicurean doctrines of materialism and of hedonism as the supreme good by which all things are to be measured. Cicero does not name Philodemus, but there is little doubt that he has the philosopher in mind when he talks here of a cultivated Greek whose philosophical discourse is so ‘slippery’ – so hard, that is, to get a proper grip on and to understand with a proper sense of moderation – that it is dangerous fare to put before an instinctive voluptuary like Piso in his youth. Piso, he tells us, was encouraged by what he heard to engage in every pleasure that came his way, believing that he had found in Philodemus ‘not a teacher of virtue but an authority on lust’. It is almost as if Zanker’s ‘pathological need for excesses of pleasure and exhibitionism’ was afflicting, in Cicero’s mind, not so much a whole class as a single disreputable individual. At any rate, coloured language and cod psychology are among the most effective weapons in the tradition of Roman forensic and political invective, and if we cannot know for sure just what went on in the bedrooms and dining rooms of the Villa of the Papyri and of Piso’s other houses, we should at the very least make a considerable discount for personal enmity and political advantage. Piso was enormously rich, and Cicero, by the inflated standards of the Roman governing élite, was not. He knew, none the less, the importance to his career of cultivating individuals. He also knew that when a man was climbing the stairway to glory it was worth his time to pay attention to the details of the personal circumstances of the rich and influential, and not least to their

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country estates, to what they signified, and to what went on within them. Plutarch tells us that, as a young man, Cicero committed to memory the names of every influential citizen along with a great deal of personal information, including ‘where he had a country estate … and it was easy for Cicero when he was travelling every road in Italy to name and point out the lands and villas of his friends’ (Cic. 7. 2). He set out to emulate them as well as his resources allowed, and, in addition to the family lands at Arpinum that he inherited from his father, he acquired numerous rural estates of his own. He had a seaside villa at Astura in Latium, for instance, not far from Antium, and hence convenient for when he needed to return to Rome, as well as villas on the Bay of Naples at Puteoli and Cumae for longer and more relaxing vacations. Above all, there were his beloved lands at Tusculum, in the Alban hills, the only place, as he tells his friend and most regular correspondent Atticus, where he could truly rest ‘from all annoyances and labours’ (Att. 1. 5. 7). Such estates were often primarily investments, no doubt, and brought in the revenue that greased the wheels of the glorious career in the Forum and the Senate House. Some, however, offered genuine repose while also serving as an expensive means to advertise cultural capital. The Villa of the Papyri possessed a great covered colonnade with fine views over the sea, which may well have been the ‘viewpoint’ or ‘belvedere’ that Philodemus mentions in one of his epigrams (Palatine Anthology 9. 412. 5) and where the philosopher and his friends can be imagined strolling as they discussed the good life. It had its mountain counterpart, perhaps on a much smaller scale, at Tusculum in Cicero’s ‘Academy’, a lecture hall and colonnade set amidst gardens, decorated with statues, and named in honour of Plato’s famous philosophy school and gardens a little to the north of Athens. Cicero enlisted the help of Atticus and the services of Atticus’ agent Lucius Cincius to find appropriate works of art for the Academy, and on these he was prepared to spend substantial sums of money. In one of the earliest of the preserved letters, written late in the autumn of 68 bc, we already find him asking Atticus to keep his eyes open for any decorations suitable for a lecture hall, and he offers the explanation that he is so delighted with his Tusculan estate that it is only when he gets there that he is truly happy in himself (Att. 1. 6. 2). A subsequent letter tells of payments to Cincius of over 20,000 sesterces for decorative

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herms, that is, bronze heads set on pedestals of fine Greek marble (Att. 1. 8. 2). We perhaps cannot hope to gauge with any precision the true level of Cicero’s commitment to the study of philosophy, or quite how much weight should be attached to the claim, not necessarily insincere because it is so trite, that philosophy is a harbour offering refuge from the world’s storms (Fam. 7. 30. 2). A severe critic may see in all this a smaller-scale manifestation of the pathological need for ostentation censured by Zanker, and no doubt concerns with wealth, status and social aspiration played their part. Then again, Cicero had visited the Athenian Academy during a tour of the glorious sites of Greece in his youth, and had heard Philo of Larissa, its last head, lecture on scepticism during a visit to Rome in the early 80s bc: there is an atmosphere here of the recreation of treasured memories, of affection and delight, that seems far removed from mere vulgar ostentation and shallow escapism. It is not clear if, at the Villa of the Papyri, Piso busied himself with reading his way through Philodemus’ treaties On Death or On the Good King According to Homer, but Cicero’s philosophical writings reveal clearly enough his own broad familiarity with the major schools of Hellenistic philosophy. The studies that had been a source of pleasure and stimulation in his youth were to provide a reservoir not only of comfort but also of a kind of indomitability in his later years when the Republic and the aristocratic constitution to which he had committed himself finally collapsed into civil war and the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. Cicero, like Horace, has seen his reputation decline considerably in the last 30 or 40 years. Many modern readers find themselves alienated by his undoubted vanity, and ever fewer have either the linguistic training or the patience to understand and admire his remarkable gifts as a writer of forensic speeches and literary philosophical dialogues. He is accused of inconsistency at best, of cowardice at worst. Certainly, there is much to be held against him. When Caesar initiated civil war by overstepping his legal authority and bringing an army south into Italy, Cicero at first dithered over whether to join the constitutionalist forces led by Pompey in open resistance. Having finally made up his mind and followed Pompey to Greece, he proved ineffectual and, after the catastrophe of defeat at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 bc,13 he was quick enough to accept Caesar’s

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amnesty and return to ignominious obscurity in his many villas. He at first bided his time, opting for inglorious quietude, but after the Ides of March he was quick to break into patriotic praise of Caesar’s murderers. Hoping that the elimination of both the dictator and his rival Pompey had opened the way for the restoration of legitimate authority, he next sought to manipulate Caesar’s heir Octavian, but also found the considerable courage needed to denounce in public the ambitions of Octavian’s partner, and Caesar’s most trusted enforcer, Mark Antony. Greater consistency would no doubt have won him greater indulgence from those who resent having had to plough through Pro Milone (‘In Defence of Milo’) or one of his other more famous court speeches for class, and perhaps fancy they would themselves show more spirit in dangerous times. There are other considerations, however, that should be kept in mind. Cicero’s oscillations and equivocations are laid out for us in his correspondence and speeches with a degree of detail not to be found for any other participant in the civil wars, not even the party leaders. Had it survived in similar volume and with equal self-revelation, the correspondence of the unabashed opportunists and the strongmen on both sides would perhaps help keep before us the difference between intermittent courage and outright criminality. In addition, the Romans gave particular weight to how a man’s character was revealed in the last moments of his life, and for most Romans there could be no doubt that, when the time finally came, Cicero met his death with courage and honour. Cicero had used his time in political retirement to compose works on politics, philosophy and rhetoric even before the civil war, especially during that period of his eclipse when Pompey shunned him and he was effectively cut out of political activity in the city. In the years after the Conference of Luca (56 bc), at which Caesar, Pompey and Crassus reaffirmed their dominance over the Republic by renewing the informal self-serving stitch-up of power that history dignifies with the name of the First Triumvirate, he wrote De Oratore (‘On the Orator’) (54 bc) and De Re Publica (‘On the Republic’) (54–1 bc). To this period also probably belongs De Legibus (‘On the Laws’), a dialogue in which Marcus Cicero and Atticus, along with Cicero’s brother Quintus, discuss the origin of the laws of nations in the natural capacity for reason innate in all human beings. The dialogue draws on Plato, and in particular

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on his Phaedrus, but Greek thought is adapted to Roman practice: reason and hence the stimulus to law are seen as natural and universal, but Cicero is at pains to explain and exemplify theory by reference to traditional Roman jurisprudence. The dialogue is set on the Ciceros’ family estate at Arpinum, and makes another claim on the attention of practical Romans concerned with the business of administering what was now no longer a uniform city state by offering a powerful exposition of the idea of the ‘two fatherlands’. Atticus, despite his Greek cognomen, is a Roman of Rome, but the Cicero brothers have a dual allegiance, as citizens both of their native Arpinum and of the Roman res publica. Marcus explains to Atticus that one fatherland (patria) is his by nature, and the other his by citizenship, and that, while he loves them both, none the less ‘that fatherland must of necessity stand first in our affection in which the name of the Republic defines the citizenship of all’ (Leg. 2. 5). Arpinum, that is, provides for Cicero the pedigree of ancestral rootedness, Rome the higher and the nobler bond of universal belonging. It is the laws of Rome that uphold and exalt that universality, and this central idea of a citizenship that transcends ancient Mediterranean loyalties to blood and land becomes, of course, one of Roman culture’s greatest gifts to the civilisation of the West. Nearly half a millennium later it is at the heart of the great paean offered to Rome by Claudian, a Roman poet and citizen for all that he was a Greek-speaking Egyptian from Alexandria: ‘mother of arms and of the laws, who spreads her rule over all and gave to us the cradle of the first law’ (De Consulatu Stilichonis (‘On the Consulship of Stilicho’) 3. 136–7). In Cicero’s time ‘new Romans’ were still on occasion subjected to the prejudices of nativist sentiment. Cicero himself was insulted on the floor of the Senate House by his enemy Clodius as a mere ‘inquilinus civis urbis Romae’, a citizen-tenant, or ‘resident alien’, of Rome (Sal., Cat. 31. 7), and the historian Velleius Paterculus says much the same thing of no less archetypical a Roman than Cato the Censor, a native of Tusculum (2. 128. 2). To call Cicero a ‘tenant’ was to imply that there was no property in the city itself or on her own lands to which he had any rightful claim, and it was perhaps to show up the lack of imagination in such thinking that Cicero chose to assert the primacy of his Roman identity not in his house on the Palatine, in the very centre of the city, but amidst the trees and waters of Arpinum and in view of the villa where he was

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born, at a time, he says, when it was no bigger than the famous country house of Curius Dentatus, a hero of the early Republic, up in the Sabine hills above Rome (Leg. 2. 3). The comparison subtly reminds Roman readers of the traditional belief that their city’s greatness was drawn, with some paradox, from their origins as a people raised in the country and imbued with the virtues of farmers, but there may be more to it than that piece of well-worn sentiment. Cicero’s reference to the Sabines may also have reminded attentive readers that, according to tradition, Clodius’ own aristocratic ancestor was himself a Sabine who had come to Rome as a refugee from political dissension in the early years of the Republic, when the city was already more than two centuries old, and who had been granted citizenship, along with his retainers, by a generous polity (Livy, Ab Urbe Condita (‘From the Foundation of the City’) 2. 16. 4–5). Clodius, in other words, could have claimed, just like Cicero, two fatherlands, one by nature and one by citizenship, if only he had been able to escape the prejudices of his class. After the defeat of the constitutionalists at Pharsalus, Cicero accepted Caesar’s pardon and returned to Italy in 47 bc. He would avoid public life, and his resistance to the new order would now take the form of a refusal to cooperate. More, he would be ready, as he told Varro in a letter late in April 46 bc, to serve as an architect, even as a mason, ‘to build up the Republic’. The studies which had formerly provided pleasure would now provide salvation of a kind, and if no one wanted his services in the Senate or the Forum, then he would write, drafting ideal political constitutions and inquiring deeply into the subjects of law and ethics in his books (Fam. 9. 2. 5). That letter was written from Rome, but the real writing was done on his many estates, above all at his beloved Tusculum. At first, perhaps, the motivation was not always of the highest, as Cicero aimed at a personal security that preserved some semblance of independence and self-respect. In July 46 bc he wrote from Tusculum to Papirius Paetus, expressing his belief that, although the Republic was in servitude, he retained the power not to say anything foolish or rash, and therefore could hope to avoid offending anyone’s feelings or damaging his own dignity (Fam. 9. 16. 5–6). Plutarch (Cic. 40. 3) describes Cicero at this time as ‘living the life of Laertes’, an allusion to the choice of Odysseus’ father in the Odyssey of Homer to live in humble obscurity in the countryside while, during Odysseus’ long absence,

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power at the centre of the state was usurped. Yet the intention that Cicero expressed to Varro, of finding some kind of salvation in writing, and of being useful to the Republic, was surely more than the bluster and pomposity his detractors deplore. At any rate, he worked; working meant writing; and when he wrote, the old Cicero who had fearlessly denounced the traitor Catiline before the Senate and the people of Rome began to use words that others might indeed have thought ‘foolish or rash’. Two years after he wrote to Papirius Paetus, we find him telling his son Marcus in the preface to the third book of De Officiis (‘On Duties’) that he lives in solitude at his villa because he is ‘kept from public affairs and the business of the Forum by force and impious arms’ (Off. 3. 1). There are few stronger words in the Latin lexicon of shock and abuse than ‘impious’. When the adjective is combined with ‘arms’ it amounts to something closer to the English ‘armed treason’: Caesar had recently been appointed to the position of dictator for 10 years in defiance of all custom and traditional law. Cicero continues: ‘For with the Senate snuffed out and the courts wiped away what is there that I could do that is worthy of me, either in the Senate House or in the Forum?’ (Off. 3. 2). And, he explains, ‘so it is that I have written more in the short time since the Republic was overthrown than I did in the many years while it still stood’ (Off. 3. 4). He tells Marcus that he is living in otium, but this is not a life of idleness and self-indulgence. It is a life of leisured resistance. His energy was astounding. To this period belong the rhetorical works Brutus, Orator (‘The Orator’) (both in 46 bc), and Topica (‘Commonplaces’) (44 bc) and the philosophical treatises Academica Posteriora (‘Later Writings on Academic Scepticism’), De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (‘On the Ends of Good and Bad Things’), Tusculanae Quaestiones (‘The Tusculan Disputations’) and De Natura Deorum (‘On the Nature of the Gods’) (all in 45 bc) and De Divinatione (‘On Divination’), De Fato (‘On Fate’), Cato Maior De Senectute (‘Cato the Elder on Old Age’), Laelius de Amicitia (‘Laelius on Friendship’), and De Officiis (all in 44 bc). There were even more which are now lost to us, such as his eulogy of Cato the Younger (45 bc) and the Consolatio in which he sought to strengthen himself after the death of his beloved daughter Tullia at Tusculum in February 45 bc. Grief and the need for distraction fed into the passion for writing that had already gripped him: ‘I

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write for entire days on end’, he told Atticus within weeks of her death (Att. 12. 14. 3). The energy can be seen in the letters too, as we find him pestering Atticus for books and information. On 28 May 45 bc, he wrote from Tusculum, asking for historical detail not available in Polybius (Att. 13. 30). The very next day he was writing again, asking to be sent a copy of philosophical works of Dicaearchus. Two days later, on 31 May, he asked for what must have been a very rare work on Homer’s Greek accentuation, and if that seems less in keeping with the larger interest in political and ethical philosophy that dominated his thinking at this time, it is a fine reminder of the perceived unity of the literary culture on which he was drawing. The summer of 45 bc finds him repeatedly asking Atticus to ferret out information for him in connection with a thorny problem of dating (Att. 12. 5b), while by August (Att. 13. 39. 2) he is asking for works by Phaedrus and Diogenes, in connection with the composition of the De Natura Deorum. The hope may at first have been of preserving his dignity, but with time his courage and his engagement returned. The Tusculan Disputations, with its discussions set amidst the walkways and the statues of the Academy laid out with the help of Atticus and Cincius in happier times (Tusc. 2. 9), was dedicated to Brutus, the ‘liberator’, and no doubt its eloquent examination of the fear of death, and of virtue as the means by which to overcome both it and pain, served to stiffen the nerves of those who were growing ever more alarmed by the megalomaniacal ambition of the dictator. Writing was what Cicero could still contribute to the resistance. That, and advice on writing. Brutus sent to him the speech he had made on the Capitol the day after Caesar was struck down and liberty restored, asking the great man to make corrections before it was published. It was a most elegant piece, Cicero thought, and the wording could hardly be bettered, but, he confided to Atticus, in Brutus’ place ‘I should have written with more fire’ (Att. 15. 1a. 2). The fact that all this was done in Latin is of the most fundamental importance. Before Cicero, philosophy had remained the preserve of Greek, the language in which the books were written and the lectures given. Latin, however, was the language of the Roman people and their state, and in choosing to write in Latin Cicero shows that, after all, he had not yet entirely given up on the Republic. The old world was being called in to help redress

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the imbalance of the new, and in his philosophical treatises Cicero sought to renew and shape the state. Greek wisdom was applied directly to Roman political affairs in order to justify and ennoble further all that was noble and just in the Roman constitution and yet was threatened with extinction by Caesar’s autocracy. In Cicero we see not Zanker’s degenerate Roman nobleman living simultaneously in two worlds that ran in parallel but never touched, consoling himself with his wealth for the loss of political rights, but a man who, if powerlessness and despair ever gripped him, none the less could give in only for a time. At Tusculum or Arpinum he could remember who he was and what he owed the greater of his two fatherlands. Resistance was not easy, but it was not yet impossible. He had of course been vulnerable all along. True, in addition to providing solitude and the time for reflection, the villas offered a certain degree of real practical refuge. A man not busy in the courts or Senate was a man less likely to wear the appearance of an immediate political threat. Then again, a man of Cicero’s stature could not simply be forgotten, and the fine Roman roads that brought his household and his friends, not to mention Atticus’ letters, to Tusculum or Puteoli could also bring armed men, and not as single spies but in battalions. In a justly famous letter (Att. 13. 52) dated 19 December 45 bc, and written, it seems, from his estate at Puteoli, Cicero tells Atticus how Caesar turned up in the neighbourhood with an armed escort of two thousand men. First he visited his associate Philippus, but Cicero appears to have felt it incumbent upon him to invite the dictator to dinner. News of the size of the escort and the strains placed on Philippus’ hospitality naturally caused him some agitation, until the next day one of Caesar’s lieutenants turned up to arrange proper safeguards. The details Cicero keeps vague, but the military language – ‘camp was pitched in the open and a guard placed on the house’ (Cic. Att. 13. 52. 1)14 – makes it clear enough that Cicero was not the man in control. Caesar, he tells us, first saw to some private business, took a stroll along the shore, and, in the customary way, had his bath at the end of the working day before setting out to be received by his host. Cicero’s correspondence is valuable to modern historians not least for the extraordinary detail it offers of Roman customs in general and of the lives of famous individuals in particular, but

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few of those details have the power to grab our attention in quite the same way as the casual observation that at the time Caesar happened to be taking a purging cure and that, since nothing he ate or drank would stay in his system for long, he ate and drank to his heart’s content. They had faced each other in battle little more than three years before, but they avoided the subject of politics, and had a lot to say instead about literature, or philologa (‘love of words’), as Cicero puts it, using the Greek term. They were two giants of Latin letters meeting on neutral ground in the world of leisured otium almost as if the civil war had never happened, and ‘really’, Cicero tells Atticus, no doubt with relief and surprise, ‘it was all very pleasant’. If he managed, however, to forget for a while the bodyguards who will have come with the dictator and the half a legion camped outside the house, Cicero was given a reminder of what it all might mean when he got the news that, as he passed the villa of Dolabella, Caesar ordered his escort to spread out on the road on either side of his horse. It may indeed have been a compliment, as Shackleton Bailey suggests,15 pointing out that Dolabella enjoyed Caesar’s favour and had been nominated for the consulship for the following year. It was also a clear demonstration of power. Three months later Caesar was dead, and two years later so was Cicero. The dictator died in the heart of the City, having provoked beyond endurance an aristocratic clique who knew that his assumption of the title ‘dictator for life’ meant the destruction of the political system that had for centuries allowed men of their class to enjoy the fruits of the oligarchy that their self-interest gave the name of ‘liberty’. On 22 April 44 bc, barely five weeks after the Ides of March, Cicero wrote, again from Puteoli, to offer Atticus his impressions of Caesar’s heir Octavian (Att. 14. 12). He was not optimistic. ‘I say he cannot be a good citizen,’ he told Atticus, because the men around him were too keen to avenge Caesar’s death in the blood of his assassins. Had he stayed at his villas, it might have been different, but he found too much temptation in the chance offered him to shape events, to manipulate the young tiro and to use him against the alternative leader of the Caesarian party, Mark Antony. He assailed Antony with the full force of the rhetoric he had once used against Piso, and the leisured resistance of Tusculum gave way once more to direct engagement in the Forum and the Senate in Rome.

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No doubt it was worth a try. Yet Caesar’s heir and Caesar’s former right-hand man needed each other, and neither truly needed Cicero. His wealth was reason enough to add him to the list of the proscribed, but personal enmity on the part of Antony ensured that he would be one of the few whose life was earnestly sought. Others might be allowed to slip out of Italy unmolested, to be reconciled with amnesties when the dominance of the Caesarian party had been assured at Philippi, but for Cicero assassins were dispatched. He was at home at Tusculum with Quintus when the news came to them that they had both been named in the proscription lists (Plut. Cic. 47. 1). They fled in different directions. Cicero headed for the sea and his villa at Astura, if we follow Plutarch (47. 1), or for the one at Formiae if we accept the account of Livy, given in a fragment of Ab Urbe Condita, Book 120, quoted by Seneca the Elder at Suasoriae (‘Speeches of Persuasion’) 6. 17, as most modern historians are inclined to do. Seneca offers his readers several literary examples, both in prose and verse, of the ‘death of Cicero’ as a theme for rhetorical treatment. The specimens vary in their details, of course, but are generally united in recording the courage with which, on 7 December 43 bc, he met his assassins and how, when they finally caught up with him, he stretched out his neck from the litter in which he was being carried and offered it to the sword. They are broadly united, too, in expressing their horror at the mutilation of his body, and in recounting how, along with the head, his hands were severed and taken to Rome to be nailed on the very rostra, the speakers’ platform in the Forum, from which he had denounced Antony. Only one, the historian Bruttedius Niger, begins his account, or at least the part of it quoted by Seneca, with the observation that when the assassins approached, Cicero ‘slipped out at the other side of the villa’ (Seneca the Elder, Suasoriae 6. 20). It sounds plausible enough, even satisfyingly appropriate. All those years before, when Pompey had done the same thing, his slaves had no doubt set about their duty and fed Cicero some courteous lie: he is visiting a neighbour, he is hunting, we do not know at what hour he will return. When the men sent to kill him arrived at Cicero’s villa, however, Plutarch records that he was betrayed by a former slave of his own brother, who told them which direction through the woods the litter was taking down to the sea. The freedman’s name, says Plutarch, was Philologus, ‘lover

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of literature’. Villas, literature, resistance to tyranny, power and violence all come together. It is very neat, even a little too neat. In the writings of Cicero’s own secretary Tiro – the one man, as the scrupulous Plutarch notes, who, above all others, would surely have known the truth (Cic. 48. 2, 49. 2) – there was no mention of the traitor, and no trace of his dishonoured name.

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2 Martial, Statius and the Epicureans: Marvellous is the Quietness of the Sea

When the two officers of the imperial fleet sent by Nero to murder Agrippina broke into her bedroom in the villa at Bauli, she – the proud great-granddaughter of the Divine Augustus and daughter of the war hero Germanicus – showed her contempt by instructing one of them to strike her in the very womb that had borne her monstrous son. She was dead within a few moments, but her part in the resistance to tyranny continued. The grim events of that spring night in ad 59 came in retrospect to serve as a turning-point. Some six years later another military man, this time a tribune of the élite Praetorian Guard by the name of Subrius Flavus, was caught up in a complicated web of conspiracy against Nero’s life. The conspirators were detected, and began to crumble under interrogation. Finding it impossible to bluff his way out of the charge and so having nothing more to lose, Flavus spoke out with the bluntness of a soldier. ‘I hated you,’ he told Nero, ‘even though none of your soldiers was more loyal to you while you deserved to be loved. I began to hate you when you became the murderer of your mother and your wife, as well as a charioteer, an actor, and an arsonist’ (Tac., Ann. 15. 67). It is a striking list of broadly parallel criminal activities. An emperor who ordered the murder of his own mother had qualified for assassination, but so, it seems, had one who, with no respect

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for his own dignity as the apex of a patriarchal hierarchy, sank so low as to appear on stage or compete in the Circus like a slave or a Greek entertainer – like someone, that is, whose station in life put him outside the ranks of the respectable citizenry of Rome altogether. The Republic that Cicero had been unable to save was gone for ever, but at the heart of the Roman political system that replaced it there still existed a more or less stable compromise designed to preserve the virile honour and collective self-esteem of the aristocratic class that Caesar’s dictatorship had threatened to emasculate. Mutual respect and a shared code of conduct were required. It was essential that the emperor should live up to the bargain. The conspiracy in which Subrius Flavus was embroiled had as its head Gaius Calpurnius Piso, a high-ranking nobleman of great wealth and charm who came from the same extended family as the Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus who was Caesar’s fatherin-law, the patron of Philodemus, and the likely owner of the Villa of the Papyri. This later Piso also had a fine villa on the Bay of Naples, but further north, near Baiae. It must have been a particularly attractive place, for Tacitus (Ann. 15. 52) tells us that Nero, who in general liked to spend his holiday time in the area, used to visit it often, and, most significantly, would make use of its baths and attend Piso’s dinner-parties without taking his usual bodyguards along, or any of the customary ‘heavy trappings of his rank’. The phrase is imprecise, but the general impression is clear enough: Nero so loved the villa, and felt such trust in his compliant host, that he would come without the usual vast train of guards and servants appropriate to his imperial stature. When they began to fear that they might be betrayed, Piso’s fellow conspirators therefore argued for bringing their plans forward, and pointed out to him the advantages presented by his own villa. How indeed could their ultimate aim be more easily achieved than in such propitious circumstances? Piso would not hear of it. The decent assassination of a tyrant for the good of the state was a noble thing. The murder of a house-guest, on the other hand, was an act of appalling sacrilege, a violation of the sacredness of the table and the gods of hospitality. Tacitus, never slow to find a perverse or discreditable motive lurking behind any profession of honourable feeling, presents Piso’s reluctance as a pretext, an early sign of the weak leadership that

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would later help bring the conspiracy to its ignominious collapse. Piso’s real fear, he tells us, was that the murder of Nero in his own villa would be used by his rivals as an excuse to push forward another candidate for the throne, one more acceptable to those who would be horrified by such an impious act. And yet honour was something that mattered to men of Piso’s class, while it is also possible that calculation played its part alongside scruple. At any rate, there is no compelling reason to believe that Tacitus’ cynicism is justified, and what does remain clear is the fact that even an emperor who had forfeited the respect of the Roman upper classes was none the less in some measure protected by the code of conduct that bound them all. Tacitus explicitly tells us that he recorded the last defiant words of Subrius Flavus because they had not been spread so widely as those of another casualty of the suppression of the conspiracy, the famous philosopher Seneca, Nero’s former tutor and advisor. The strong, unadorned sentiments of a military man were, in his view, at least as worthy of record, at least as deserving of a place in men’s memory when they would read of the tyrant’s crimes and of those who resisted him. That observation comes a few pages after his account of how Seneca met his end, and in place of the mooted assassination of Nero in a seaside villa his narrative of the conspiracy offers us the stage-managed death of Seneca in his villa on the outskirts of Rome itself. Such suburban villas were prized possessions of the Roman rich. They allowed their owners to spend their day, if business required it, amidst the bustle of the capital, attending sessions of the Senate, pleading cases in the Basilica Julia, or meeting with their own dependants. They also allowed them to retire to ease and quietude when dusk fell, to enjoy their spacious gardens and fine views, and to dine in comfort with their friends. There they could also sleep a deep and uninterrupted sleep, far from the raucous centre of the crowded city where the noisy carts not permitted inside the walls by day delivered their goods by night, keeping poorer citizens awake as they rumbled and clattered their way through the streets. What rented accommodation, asks the satirist Juvenal, could be expected to admit sleep within its walls? A good night’s rest only came with great riches (Sat. 3. 234–5). The epigrammatist Martial makes the same point. In his rented apartment on the Quirinal, he tells Sparsus, he is woken by the laughter of every crowd passing by in the street, and has

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‘Rome right at his bedside’ (Epigrams 12. 57. 26–7). Upper-class poets rich enough to own suburban estates, or ‘horti’ (‘gardens’, a term of studied understatement), were to be envied by poor ones. They could compose in comfort and at their leisure, untroubled by material concerns and with their minds set on artistic achievement alone. Other, less fortunate, poets need to eat, and glory is not enough for them, but ‘Let Lucan lie in his marble gardens, content with his fame’, says Juvenal (Sat. 7. 79–80), naming another casualty of the Pisonian conspiracy, Seneca’s nephew, the wealthy young author of an epic poem on The Civil War between Caesar and Pompey. Within this complex of ideas about wealth, suburban villas and the production of literature Tacitus’ account (Ann. 15. 60–4) of how Seneca met his death takes on a faintly mocking, perhaps even hostile, edge. There was no real evidence to show that Seneca had been connected with the Pisonian conspiracy, but Nero was perhaps either being especially cautious or else taking advantage of the large numbers involved to tidy away those who had become irritants to him or whose more virtuous lives stood out in a villainous age as a reproach to his own conduct. When the plot was brought into the light Seneca had by chance very recently returned from Campania, and had reached his suburban estate four miles from the city. Daylight was fading and his wife, Pompeia Paulina, and he were dining with two friends. The tribune sent by Nero to confront Seneca with such scraps of evidence as he possessed surrounded the villa with his men, and was admitted to the dining room. Was it true, Seneca was asked, that he had spoken some words of encouragement to Piso’s envoy Natalis, associating his own wellbeing with the success of Piso’s venture? When the philosopher denied the charge, such as it was, the tribune headed back for Rome and a hasty consultation with Nero in the company of his wife, the Empress Poppaea, and his chief advisor, Tigellinus. Was Seneca making things easy for them, he was asked; were there any signs that he was preparing to end his own life? Well, no: he was calmly eating his dinner. The tribune was therefore ordered to make the journey a third time, carrying the emperor’s order of execution, but whereas Agrippina’s death had been a matter of supreme urgency and she had therefore been cut down on the spot, Seneca was allowed to take his time and choose the words by which he wished to be remembered. He had once written an entire

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treatise On Mercy (De Clementia), instructing the young Nero on the nature of a virtue that was to be expected of sovereigns above all other men, and in keeping with the code of honour that bound their class together he was accorded such mercy as would serve to let him die in a dignified manner and by his own hand. It did not turn out quite like that, if Tacitus is to be believed. The historian fair-mindedly notes that Seneca showed no fear, and relates how the great philosopher began by playing his role as custom required, speaking noble words of consolation to his wife and friends but also rebuking them for deserting the maxims of philosophy, for showing weakness in the face of adversity as if they had not already known Nero to be entirely capable of murdering his own guardian and tutor just as he had murdered his own mother and brother. Tacitus quotes some of the speech, but then cuts it short, observing sharply that it was all rather like a public lecture. He goes on to explain how the protagonist then found himself obliged to share the stage in a double-act, as Paulina insisted on ending her life in tandem with his own suicide. They opted for a time-honoured method, severing the veins in their arms, but in Seneca’s case the blood would not flow with the required speed and ease because, as Tacitus reports it, the philosopher’s long years of eating sparsely had left him too thin and wiry for that. He therefore cut the arteries in his leg and behind his knees, and persuaded his wife to exit the stage and die in a bedroom without him so that he would not lose courage through the sight of her own suffering. And still death would not come. Seneca asked his doctor for a poison, and not for any old poison, but for hemlock, which had been used by the Athenian democracy to dispatch convicted criminals. The symbolism and the self-aggrandisement are clear: the most famous of those convicted criminals to drink the cup of hemlock was Socrates, and the emperor whose ambitions as an amateur actor had earned him the disgust of Subrius Flavus was being outdone by a consummate old ham. Not even that would work, however, so finally Seneca was carried into his own bath house, and gently steamed to death. In the course of this long drawn-out and somewhat farcical scene, Seneca continued to struggle on, despite the pain and exhaustion, with his chosen role, and so, ‘since even at his last moment his eloquence did not fail him, he summoned scribes and dictated a long discourse.’ I shall not bother giving you any of it,

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Tacitus notes, cutting him off a second time: it has been published in Seneca’s own words. If Tacitus’ own contemporaries could seek out a copy and judge for themselves how well Seneca had met his end, and whether he had shown a courage to match that of Cicero, we on the other hand cannot. Many of Seneca’s works have been transmitted, but not this speech, and so it is that our only Death of Seneca comes to us from the pen of an unsentimental historian whose account undermines the self-conscious performance of martyrdom by insinuating an element of black comedy. And yet it is striking, all the same, that resistance of a kind is still offered to tyranny by holding the tyrant’s destructive acts up to the judgement of posterity, and doing so through the élite medium of a literary tradition imbued with the ideal of the villa as a place associated with otium, with civilised life, and with Greek philosophy. It was Socrates that Seneca sought to emulate, and his ‘long discourse’, in combination with the use of hemlock, was no doubt intended to recall Plato’s account in the Phaedo of how the condemned philosopher spent his last days discussing, with his friends in the state prison of Athens, the immortality of the soul that an imperfect polity of imperfect men could not destroy. Cicero and Philodemus, however, have also shaped this particular literary suburban villa and its significance for Tacitus’ readers. Like Cicero and Philodemus before him, Seneca had sought to make available to the ruling class of Rome the ancient wisdom of the Greeks, and Seneca, indeed, took second place only to Cicero for his achievement in domesticating the Greek tradition of philosophical writing in the Latin language. Composing uplifting discourses in the comfort of their villas, and yet dying under the shadow of a corrupted despotism, Cicero and Seneca demand to be compared. If Seneca does not come out of Tacitus’ account as well as Cicero appears in those of authors like Livy, that may be because the century that separated their deaths had so warped Roman society that heroism had become harder to achieve; or perhaps just harder to believe in; or perhaps merely harder for Tacitus to believe in. There is yet more to it, however. It was Agrippina who brought Seneca to court as Nero’s philosophy teacher. The accounts that Tacitus gives us in his Annales of the deaths in their villas of both Agrippina and Seneca are magnificent set-pieces surely intended to be read against each other, not least because they both die as illustrious victims of Seneca’s disappointing pupil. It is all but certain,

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however, that these two set-pieces originally served as the first and second of a trio, for, as chance would have it, Nero too would meet his end in a villa. The portion of the Annales that would have told of Nero’s last days has, like Seneca’s final discourse, perished, but the loss is partially off-set by Nero’s biographer, Suetonius (Nero 47–9). Nero’s rule finally crumbled in ad 68, when the defection of armies on the German frontier and in Spain had made it obvious that he was losing his grip on power, with the result that even his Praetorian Guards began to desert him. The night before he died Nero prepared to flee, his intention being to escape by sea from Ostia. He therefore went first to the horti Serviliani, no doubt an imperial suburban villa comparable to the one in which the envious Juvenal imagined Lucan writing his poetry. Next to nothing is known of this particular estate, but if it was convenient for Ostia, then it probably lay somewhere to the south of the city. It appears to have been one that Nero was fond of, and we know from Tacitus (Ann. 15. 55) that he had been staying there on the dramatic night, three years before, when Milichus, the freedman of Scaevinus, one of the Pisonian conspirators, turned up at the gate. Milichus had come to betray his master, first to Nero’s secretary Epaphroditus and then to the emperor in person, thereby precipitating the events that led to so many deaths, those of Seneca and Lucan among them. The suburban villa where Nero had received deliverance, then, now becomes the setting for the opening scene in the last act of the imperial ham’s farcical life. Tacitus would surely have enjoyed the irony, and expected his readers to note it. Waking in the middle of the night, Suetonius relates, Nero discovered that his personal guards had gone. Some at least of the slaves must have still been there, as he is recorded as having sent messages to his amici – his ‘friends’ and counsellors. None would reply, however, and as his panic mounted Nero ‘ran out, as if intending to hurl himself into the Tiber’. That might have been more dignified than the end that awaited him, but at this point Phaon, his freedman, intervened, and offered him shelter at the suburban villa he owned between the Salarian and Nomentan Ways, to the north-east of the city, and, by coincidence, like Seneca’s, four miles out. How lavish a place this was we cannot hope to know, but no doubt it was much less so than the Servilian Gardens. Perhaps readers of Suetonius’ other biographies may at this point have remembered a detail from

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his account of the life of Nero’s great-great-grandfather Augustus (Aug. 72), a man famous for his simple tastes. Suetonius had noted that, when Augustus found himself in need of a quiet place where he could work undisturbed, he would retreat to a special upper room in his own house on the Palatine or else, presumably to put even more distance between himself and his petitioners, to the suburban villa of one or other of his freedmen. These villas are unlikely to have been large and showy, given that Suetonius goes on to add that Augustus ordered his own granddaughter Julia to tear down a villa of hers that he thought was excessively opulent and notes also that his own were modest properties. The journey to Phaon’s villa was not long, but it was dangerous enough to suggest to Nero that he needed to disguise himself in an old cloak, while keeping his head and face covered. When Suetonius informs us that the journey was also marked by an earthquake and by a flash of lightning that landed close to the terrified emperor, we may perhaps feel that we are passing from biography into melodrama. The pointed contrast between Nero’s past glory, however, and his present abasement is also enhanced by the contrast between the villa of Phaon and the wonderful Golden House that Nero had constructed in the centre of the city when the ruins had been cleared after the Great Fire of ad 64. The pavilions of the Golden House were set in the midst of an immense stretch of parkland, complete with fields, pastures, vineyards, woods and an artificial lake. Gold and gems decorated many of its rooms, the dining-rooms had ceilings of ivory, and the main room where banquets were held was equipped with a marvellous revolving ceiling that emulated the heavens above. Nothing makes clearer to us Suetonius’ condemnation of Nero’s vanity and relentless self-obsessed aestheticism than the claim that, on dedicating the Golden House upon its completion, he preciously declared that finally he could start to live like a human being (Nero 31. 2). His entrance into Phaon’s villa, on the other hand, is marked in Suetonius’ account by sordid degradation. When they reached the side road that led to the villa, Nero’s party let their horses run loose and then fought their way through the bushes and brambles towards the back of the house. The owner of the Golden House was invited by Phaon to hide for a while in a hole in the ground while a secret way into the villa was devised. He declined, but in due course Nero was obliged to crawl on all fours through a

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narrow passage that had been dug through the wall.1 He emerged into a small room – a cella, no doubt intended to serve as a slave’s sleeping-quarters – and sank down on a bed with an old cloak for a blanket. His companions made clear to him the hopelessness of his position; even the normally craven Senate had now turned against him, declaring him a ‘public enemy’. Far better, they urged him, to bring it all to an end himself than wait to be captured and ignominously executed, beaten to death, in accordance with venerable custom, like a common criminal. His mother had met her fate with epigram and defiance. Nero met his with self-pity (‘What an artist dies in me!’, he wailed), and, on hearing the arrival of the execution party’s horses, a rather trite quotation from Homer. Hurriedly, his secretary Epaphroditus helped him drive a dagger into his neck. The centurion who burst into the room was just in time to watch him die, and, perhaps to keep the situation as calm as possible, he pretended he had come to help. So it was that the farce was played to its end, and Nero, as vain and foolish as ever, and despite the squalor of his surroundings, died under the misapprehension that the centurion at least was still devoted to him. His last words were praise for his would-be executioner and the witness of his degradation: ‘This’, he declared, ‘is what loyalty is.’ A generation later Rome was ruled by another emperor who would, like Nero, earn himself a place in the Roman literary tradition as a tyrant with a megalomania for lavish building projects. Domitian, the third and last emperor of the Flavian dynasty, had his architect Rabirius construct for him a spectacular new palace that sprawled over most of the south-eastern quarter of the Palatine hill,2 dominating the skyline above the Circus Maximus in the valley to the south and dwarfing the deliberately humble residence of Augustus a little to the west. When not in Rome, he resided by preference in the similarly large and opulent Alban villa whose ruins now lie under Castel Gandolfo. In a speech delivered just over three years after Domitian’s death, Pliny the Younger repeatedly draws the contrast between those terrible times and the freedom and happiness now available to all under the rule of the Emperor Trajan. As only one of many examples of the difference between the two reigns, he claims that in Domitian’s day it was fatal to own too spacious a house or too pleasant a villa (Panegyricus 50. 5).

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The implication is that, in order to have an excuse to confiscate such a property to the imperial treasury, Domitian would fabricate a capital charge against its owner. Modern historians of the Flavian age seek to take a more objective line on Domitian than we can reasonably expect from Pliny and other authors of the time who, having risen to prominence under his supposed tyranny, were quick to distance themselves when he was assassinated in ad 96 and just as quick to identify themselves with his successors. Yet the claim must have had some basis in fact given that Pliny seems to have expected his audience to accept it, even if only as an elegant piece of rhetorical exaggeration. Perhaps a degree of political caution may therefore have provided an additional nuance to poetry that drew on the long tradition of praise of rural virtue and contentment with a small property that has its most famous expression in Horace’s presentation of himself at peace on his little farm at Tibur. At any rate, it is to Martial and Statius, poets whose careers were made in the reign of Domitian, that we owe our first extended verse descriptions of Roman villas, and these are poems that lay emphasis not only on the seclusion and otium of their cultured owners but also on their lack of wordly ambition. Martial had come to Rome from distant Spain, and his oldest and closest friend in the city appears to have been a man who happened to have a very similar name, one Julius Martialis. When we were first introduced to him, Martialis was living in a domus, a townhouse, apparently rented, in a street known as the Via Tecta (‘the Covered Way’) on the Campus Martius. He lived close to the heart, that is, of the bustling city, in the area to the north-west of the old Republican walls where, over the course of the first century, a vast agglomeration of both private housing and public buildings such as theatres, baths and temples had come to occupy the extensive flat ground that lay in the bend of the river Tiber (Epigrams 3. 5). The most famous of the poems that Martial addressed to his friend celebrates the life of leisure that they led on the Campus as they walked and chatted and idled away the hours amidst the shaded colonnades and the magnificent public baths and other amenities of a refined urban paradise (Epigrams 5. 20). In time, however, perhaps through inheritance, Martialis acquired a suburban villa that stood at some distance from the Campus, high up on what we now call Monte Mario, the loftiest of the hills in that part of the

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Tiber valley. It enjoyed splendid views north towards the Milvian Bridge, and east across the heart of Rome to the hills around Alba and Tusculum where the truly wealthy, Domitian among them, had their own country retreats. The poem in which Martial describes this suburban villa (Epigrams 4. 64) is one of the most charming in the entire collection. It is also one of the longest, allowing the poet, even within the self-consciously small compass of an epigram, to incorporate many traditional themes, and then to add some new ones. The very first line of the poem refers to the ‘few acres’ of Julius Martialis, using a phrase taken directly from the opening of a famous ode in which Horace had deplored the taste of his wealthy contemporaries for luxurious architecture (Carm. 2. 15. 1).3 Martial’s poem accordingly associates the suburban villa of his friend with Horace’s praise of the simple country life, far from the corrupting influence of money. The second line of Martial’s poem describes the villa as more blessed than the mythical gardens of the Hesperides supposedly located at the farthest westerly point of the world, from which, as one of his twelve labours, Hercules had brought back the golden apples that grew there in a magic grove consecrated to Juno. The third line, in revealing the location of the villa ‘lying on the long ridge of the Janiculum’, teasingly reassures us that the delights on offer in Martialis’ semi-rural idyll are much easier to obtain. The real-life advantages of a suburban estate included, as we have seen, the chance to get a decent night’s sleep far away from, not least, the appalling clatter of the traffic, and this idea is also worked into the encomium of Martialis’ villa (Epigrams 4. 64. 18–22): On the other side the carrier on the Flaminian or the Salarian Way Is plainly to be seen, but his cart is hushed, Lest its wheel should annoy the gentle slumber That neither the call that gives time to the boatmen Nor the shouts of the men towing the barges can shatter. The roads leading north are full of carriers bringing their loads into the city on wheeled carts known as esseda that were infamous for the noise they made, so much so that Seneca the Younger congratulated himself on his ability as a philosopher to rise above

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it and get on with his work (Ep. 56. 4). Even worse is the river traffic, with the boatmen rowing in time to the celeuma, the ‘order’ or call of the coxswain. Then there is the competing din made by the helciarii, the ‘draggers’, whose job seems to have been to walk along the towpath, perhaps yelling to each other as well as calling out to encourage the mules that slowly towed the barges on the river beside them. As Delphina Fabbrini points out,4 these terms all belong to a low literary register, and the use of Greek words is also in keeping with the half-Greek world of the city’s cosmopolitan workforce. Martial’s readers might also remember Horace’s famous account of his journey to Brundisium, in which he complains that the day resounded to the insults with which the slaves and the boatmen assailed each other and relates how his first night’s sleep was almost ruined by a drunken singing-contest between one of the boatmen and one of his fellow-travellers (Sat. 1. 5. 11–19).5 From all this noise Julius Martialis, up in his hilltop suburban retreat, is entirely free, and yet there would be pleasure for the well-educated Roman reader in seeing how Horatian pastoral fantasy is brought so close to the sordid realities of life that, in literature, would normally be associated with Juvenal’s satire and Martial’s own usually much less romantic epigrams. Other evocations of earlier Roman poets, however, may be pointed rather than merely decorative or amusing, and there are elements in this poem that seem to invite us to think of Lucretius’ great exposition of the material doctrines of Epicurean philosophy in his De Rerum Natura (‘On the Nature of the Universe’). Lucretius set out in that poem to show how Epicurus’ explanation of all that exists and all that happens – his explanation of it all in material terms, as the interaction of matter and void in infinite time and space – can liberate humanity from the crippling fear of death. It is, Lucretius argues, that fear that drives men to commit acts both of wickedness and of folly, and not the least of those follies is the desperate pursuit of worldly ambition, of the fame that comes with political power. Some, he says, ‘perish for the sake of statues and a name’ (De Rerum Natura 3. 78). Others have wealth but not the peace of mind to enjoy it, and are therefore unhappier than those who are wisely content with little and will enjoy their life while they can and accept their death with serenity. Lucretius paints for us the memorable picture of a rich man who is so maddened

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by boredom in his city mansion that it prompts him to drive at breakneck speed to his villa, only to find that ‘as soon as he has touched the villa’s threshold, straightaway he yawns’ (De Rerum Natura 3. 1065). In contrast to all this, the villa of Julius Martialis, which serves as a metonymical expression of the character of its owner, is said to stand on ground described with mild paradox as a ‘modest swelling’ (modico tumore, line 5). The phrase hints at a part-Horatian, part-Epicurean lack of unseemly ambition. On the other hand, so high does the villa stand above Rome that it all but touches the stars (lines 9–10), and it is set apart in an atmosphere of serenity and private light (Epigrams 4. 64. 6–8): It enjoys to the full a serener sky, And though cloud conceals the curving valleys It shines alone with a light that is all its own. It is not likely that Julius Martialis could have counted as one of the richest men in Flavian Rome, and his ‘few acres’ will probably not have been able to bear comparison with the suburban villas of a Seneca or a Lucan. Even so, some readers would surely have thought here of the grandest of all possible residences, the ‘quiet seat’ of the gods, who, in Lucretius’ description, live in true Epicurean ataraxia, a state of untroubled serenity where nothing can harm them. Their abode is one that also enjoys its own light and perfect weather: ‘a sky which is ever cloudless covers it, and beams with far-spread light’ (De Rerum Natura 3. 21–2). There is no clear, unmistakeable quotation of a few words from Lucretius in Martial’s phrasing that would correspond to the quotation from Horace’s ode in the first line of the poem. None the less, the description of the villa of Julius Martialis seems to draw upon the Epicurean tradition, and if we are reluctant to link it directly with Lucretius, we can at least see how Martial’s poem might be read by his contemporaries in the context of the tradition that stretches back to Philodemus and his Epicurean library in the Villa of the Papyri. Julius Martialis is happy and content, free from vain ambition. For him peace, serenity and wisdom are enough. This villa will feature in no one’s plans to assassinate the head of state – and no one living so innocent a life in so innocent a place need fear that he might one day find himself compelled to open his veins or drink the philosopher’s cup of hemlock.

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We must turn to the works of Martial’s contemporary Statius, however, for a truly thorough, and quite unmistakable, presentation of a villa as the peaceful retreat of someone who thought of himself as a committed follower of Epicurus. The reputation of Statius has rested mainly, as he appears to have hoped it would, upon his epic poem the Thebaid, a grim and elaborate retelling of that most un-Epicurean of subjects, the internecine war of Oedipus’ brother-sons Eteocles and Polynices for the throne of Thebes. It is a tale of incest and family hatred, of worldly ambition and its disastrous consequences for a doomed dynasty, a far cry in both subject-matter and poetic treatment from the serenity of Martialis’ suburban villa. Much of Statius’ poetry, however, was written in a lighter vein, usually for friends and patrons who had much more in common with Julius Martialis than with the heroes of Greek myth memorialised in epic and tragedy. One of the most remarkable survivals of ancient literature is his Silvae (‘Woods’), a collection of occasional poems in various metres celebrating such events as the weddings and births of his patrons and their children, or commemorating the lives and funerals of those dear to them, or else recording more splendid occasions, such as the experience of dining as Domitian’s guest in the very banqueting room built by Rabirius as part of the palace complex on the Palatine. What unites the poems is that they all offer warm praise of the dedicatees, and such praise is most likely to have been congenial to these friends and patrons of the poet if it reflected reality, or at least was recognisably in harmony with their aspirations and their view of themselves. Two of these patrons who concern us here are Manilius Vopiscus and Pollius Felix, recipients of substantial compositions describing their villas, respectively at Tibur (Tivoli) and at Surrentum (Sorrento) on the Bay of Naples, as the blessed settings of a life of Epicurean serenity appropriate to the learned and civilised characters of their owners. The villa of Vopiscus – or rather, as Statius presents it, a double villa, with buildings arranged on either side of the river Anio – is said in the opening lines of the poem to have been adorned by Venus and Voluptas. The first of these deities, the Roman goddess of love and procreation, is the addressee of the great hymn with which Lucretius begins his De Rerum Natura, interpreting her in his Epicurean poetics as the force that ensures the endless cycle of life and death. Similarly, Voluptas is the Roman name for Hedone,

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or Pleasure, and pleasure for the Epicureans was, in a material world, the highest good. Epicurean associations are readily found throughout the poem. When, for example, Statius describes how, in the vicinity of the villa, the normally turbulent Anio runs more quietly, not disturbing Vopiscus in his peaceful dreams that are full of poetry, the language echoes that used by Roman authors to refer to Epicurean ataraxia. The associations are most clear towards the end of the poem, where explicit encomium is offered of Vopiscus’ serene and virtuous character, and where we are told that his life is one that harmoniously balances elegance and pleasure without falling into the luxurious indolence that is harmful to the character. All this, says Statius in an allusion to Epicurus’ deme and his gardens near Athens, produces such virtuous delight as ‘the old man of Gargettus himself would prefer/ Departing from his own Athens and abandoning his garden’ (Stat., Silv. 1. 3. 93–4). It is possible to read this poem, like Martial’s on the suburban villa of Julius Martialis, as subtly communicating political quietism, albeit with a stronger and clearer emphasis on the idea that contentment with one’s private wealth and a devotion to philosophy and literature are to be seen as a specifically Epicurean way of life. All the same, there is little to suggest that in truth anyone would have thought Manilius Vopiscus likely to present a serious danger to the Flavian dynasty, and it may be that the poem was understood as an elegant justification of a rich dilettante’s decision not to engage in the service to the state normally expected of men of his wealth and social standing. Of far greater complexity, and deeper interest, is the presentation of Pollius Felix in Silvae 2. 2. Statius’ friendship with Pollius appears to have been closer than his connection with Vopiscus, and the presentation of Pollius as both as a keen Epicurean and as a recluse who, safe at his Surrentine villa, has eschewed political ambition is more systematically worked out. In addition, there is evidence to suggest that something more positive than mere quietism, something connected with real political danger, is at work in the poem on the Surrentine villa. As Carole Newlands observes, ‘in the second part of the poem the villa emerges as an overt symbol of Pollius’ Epicurean way of life and values (121–42) that also provides a provocative counterpart to imperial splendour and autocratic rule.’6 All that would be true even if it were not the case that Pollius’ wife Polla, as we shall see, was almost certainly

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the widow of a distinguished casualty of imperial displeasure a little over 20 years before the poem was written. Epicurean themes, along with the literary aspirations of the villa’s owner, are strongly marked from the opening of the poem, in which Statius commends his host as ‘peaceful’ and noted for his ‘eloquence’. The villa stood upon the cliffs above a sheltered inlet of the Bay, and Statius, who describes the approach by sea from Naples, lays emphasis on how the calm serenity of the waters reflects the character of Pollius himself (Silv. 2. 2. 26–9): Marvellous is the quietness of the sea: here the weary waters lay aside Their fury, and the raging southern winds do blow with gentler breath; Here the rushing tempest shows less boldness, and with no turbulent uproar The unassuming pool lies still, in imitation of its master’s ways. As in the address to Vopiscus, it is at the end of the poem that we find the most explicit statement of Epicurean allegiance. We learn that in his youth Pollius, a citizen of the important commercial centre of Puteoli who had also been granted citizenship in the older and more culturally important city of Naples, had entertained political ambitions, standing in both places for office when he ‘was full of youthful heat and proud in his wanderings from the right path’ (Silv. 2. 2. 137). Age has brought wisdom, and he is now at rest, having found in this literal refuge from the stormy seas a metaphorical ‘carefree harbour and peaceful quiet’ for the ‘unshattered ship’ of his life (Silv. 2. 2. 140–1). Here he dwells in harmony with his wife, spending his time on philosophy and literature and ‘meditating on the precepts of the Gargettian teacher’, which he sets to the lyre (Silv. 2. 2. 112–15). As Philodemus had composed both personal poetry and prose treatises of an Epicurean character, we may perhaps imagine Pollius writing Epicurean works over a similar range. Yet the phrasing seems rather to imply poetry alone, so perhaps Pollius composed didactic hexameters after the model of Lucretius. That, at any rate, would give additional point to the literary echoes of De Rerum Natura that Statius works into the poem. When, for example, he speaks of Pollius as an uncomplaining sage at the banquet of life

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who, when his last day has come, is ‘ready to depart and sated with life’ (Silv. 2. 2. 128–9), we recall Lucretius’ personified Nature rebuking the unenlightened malingerer with his reluctance to leave even though he has eaten his fill at life’s table (De Rerum Natura 3. 938–9). Similarly, the praise of Pollius as one who, up there in his clifftop refuge, can look down from ‘the lofty citadel of the mind’ and laugh at the folly of men who are ‘enslaved to the fleeting goods’ of fortune and worldly ambition (Silv. 2. 2. 129–32) not only recalls loosely the detachment of Lucretius’ gods in their ‘quiet seat’ but more specifically the ataraxia (‘freedom from passion’) of the Epicurean sage evoked in the opening lines of his second book (De Rerum Natura 2. 1–4): Sweet it is, when upon the great sea the winds are vexing the waters, To look out from the land at someone else’s great labour; Not because there is any pleasure or delight in knowing another is in trouble, But because it is sweet to perceive the ills from which you yourself are free. All this we could interpret in terms as dismissive as those used by Zanker of the aristocrats of the Late Republic just over a century before. Once more we find ourselves at a luxurious villa on the Bay of Naples, and once more we see a rich man in retreat from the world of politics and living a life of refined leisure and Greek culture. We could even take that further, and argue that the long, settled rule of the emperors had in the meantime tempted even the local Hellenic aristocracy of this traditionally Greek-speaking part of Italy to emulate the would-be dropouts of the Roman ruling class. And yet the most likely reason for the honour given to Pollius of a grant of citizenship from Naples would be public benefaction, and it is clear enough that he had once had ambitions to serve the state in the kind of capacity expected of the rich. His daughter, moreover, married Julius Menecrates, a Neapolitan who certainly seems to have had plenty of ambition, and in a poem celebrating the birth of Menecrates’ third child Statius holds out the glorious prospect that his daughter will marry into a patrician family and her two brothers one day achieve membership, not merely of the local governing council, but of ‘the Senate of Romulus’ in the

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imperial capital itself (Silv. 4. 8. 59–62). Perhaps Pollius Felix himself was making the best of a bad job, and had, as Robin Nisbet suggests, ‘been disappointed in minor ambitions at Puteoli’.7 Then again, it may simply be that he was getting on in years, and felt he had done enough. As Pliny the Younger told his correspondent Pomponius Bassus, expressing his own longing for the day when he might follow him into well-earned retirement, a man’s early and middle years were owed to the service of the nation, but the laws permitted that the last stage of life be spent in otium (Ep. 4. 23. 3–4). To read it, however, in any of these ways goes against the grain of what the poem tells us, for Statius insists that Pollius was a committed Epicurean who had forsworn worldly ambition upon the treacherous seas of political engagement. Carole Newlands convincingly argues that Statius, in this poem as throughout the Silvae, draws upon the Roman moralising tradition, seen not least in the poetry of Horace, that regarded wealth and personal indulgence as a political and moral failing, but does so only to undermine it.8 Wealth, as Statius presents it, is harnessed to Greek culture and philosophy, and given a new, positive value that redeems it. Pollius and his wife Polla live in harmony, offer their friendship to poets, and use their riches with enlightened generosity, acting as patrons of the arts and as welcoming hosts. Their villa is a large and majestic affair, and even the colonnade that leads from the beach up to the main building on the clifftop is described as being as vast as a city (urbis opus, Silv. 2. 2. 31). Similar language is used of numerous other villas in Roman literature, but usually with the intention of censuring the extravagance of degenerate modernity, as when Sallust lists ‘houses and villas built up like cities’ among the visible signs of moral corruption in the Late Republic (Cat. 12. 3) or Suetonius expresses his horror at the aberration of the vast rural estate in the heart of Rome, Nero’s Golden House, with ‘its lake the size of a sea and surrounded by buildings that looked like a city’ (Nero 31. 1). Archaeology offers parallels too, as Nicholas Purcell notes in describing the ‘whimsical’ ornamentation of the villa at Settefinestre in Etruria with its garden boundary wall made to look like ‘a miniature city fortification complete with turrets’.9 For Newlands, however, the Surrentine estate of Pollius Felix offers an alternative to Rome, the city par excellence, in the form of a Greek villa with all the resources of a city or indeed the entire

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empire, but devoted to the arts.10 Within his own world Pollius has his own Helicon to give him inspiration (Silv. 2. 2. 36–40), and the villa is full of statues and paintings (Silv. 2. 2. 63–72) to be enjoyed with the unhurried attention that, according to Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. 36. 27), the hassled inhabitants of Rome had no time to devote to the masterpieces found all over the imperial capital. In addition, a magnificent room at the top of the villa takes symbolic possession of all the lands that can be seen from it: ‘across the expanse of the sea each different window is served by a land all its own’ (Silv. 2. 2. 74–5). That same majestic room is fitted with a dazzling array of coloured marbles: white picked out with spots of purple from Asia Minor, green serpentine from the mountains near Sparta in the Peloponnese, and yellow-red Numidian from North Africa. The room thus ‘incorporates the vast resources of empire, suggesting that the villa is a microcosm of the imperial palace’.11 Indeed, as Newlands goes on to remark, the red Egyptian granite that is also to be found in Pollius’ spectacular room similarly adorned that most regal of settings, the dining room of the Flavian palace where the poet attended a banquet as the guest of the emperor himself.12 These details suggest an almost imperial power, along with the exercise of patronage in the imperial style, within Pollius’ small corner of the Roman world. The same is true of the observation that, because the various buildings that make up the complex look both east and west, the villa not only receives the rising sun but also, when the day is done, ‘refuses to dismiss the light’ (Silv. 2. 2. 45–7). This is the language of master and slave, and we may think fleetingly of dinner parties, with Statius no doubt sometimes in attendance, continuing in the last lingering rays of the westering sun, with the light itself presented here as a weary slave longing to be dismissed to his bed for the night. Indeed, to command the sun is imperial might on a cosmic scale, and for a moment, albeit only within his small realm, Pollius is flatteringly credited with the kind of power that, for example, Nero laid claim to when he decorated with a radiate crown the colossal statue of the Sun God, complete with his own features, that stood in the courtyard before the entrance to the Golden House.13 There are more suggestions of imperial power, too, in Statius’ other poem for Pollius Felix (Silv. 3. 1), in which we find him restoring on a lavish scale a small dilapidated temple dedicated to

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Hercules on the Surrentine property, and then instituting an annual festival in honour of the god, complete with athletic games in the traditional Greek style (Silv. 3. 1. 151–3). Statius had come to Pollius’ villa, he tells us at the beginning of Silv. 2. 2, from a similar but far more illustrious competition, the Augustalia (or, in Greek, the ‘Sebasta’), that had been held in Naples every four years since ad 2 in honour of their founder, the Divine Augustus. Other poets had moved on to the Actian Games that were soon to be held across the sea on the western coast of Greece in honour of Augustus’ victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium (Silv. 2. 2. 7–8). The model used was the Olympic Games, and both festivals ranked in status with the four great ancient pan-Hellenic festivals. It is therefore tempting to suspect that, in setting up a rival festival, Pollius was in some sense usurping the role of the emperor. In not continuing on the usual circuit of the various games, at any rate, and declining to accompany his fellow-poets to Actium, while preferring instead the quiet poetic refuge of Pollius’ Epicurean villa, Statius is paying a compliment to his friend, a student of philosophy and himself a poet. There is no real or meaningful slight to the imperial monarchy, because the gap between the small local festival on Pollius’ estate and the Augustalia is far too great for any comparison to amount to a statement of equality. To make that point clear Statius notes how, as she gazes out across the Bay towards the villa, Naples ‘smiles benignly’ at the smaller festival that offers her no true competition (Silv. 3. 1. 151). And who could take umbrage or suspect disloyalty when all this is combined with gentle humour? As he usually does in his poetry, Statius calls Naples ‘Parthenope’, ‘the Maiden’, using a learned sobriquet originating in a myth according to which a Siren, herself a virgin (Greek parthenos), had given names to both Naples and Sorrento, ‘the walls known by the Sirens’ names’ (Silv. 2. 2. 1). The competitors at Greek games were unclothed, and Statius shows us the virgin city gazing across the waters and smiling indulgently as she gets an eyeful of ‘the contests of the naked men’ (Silv. 3. 1. 152–3). What gives all this an edge is the likely identity of Pollius’ wife, Polla. The seventh and last poem of the book of the Silvae in which the description of the villa appears is addressed to a woman also called Polla, who turns out to be the widow of the poet Lucan. Statius’ preface to the book gives a fuller version of her name, Polla Argentaria, and records that she herself commissioned the

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seventh poem from him in honour of her deceased husband’s birthday. By chance, we can still read three four-line epigrams by Martial (Epigrams 7. 21–3) that similarly commemorate the poet’s birthday, two of them also naming Polla. No doubt other poets whose works have vanished were called on to pay their own homage. It is true that Statius does not make it unambiguously clear that the widow of Lucan is the same lady who became in later life the wife of Pollius Felix, and not everyone is convinced by the many arguments from probability and circumstance advanced by Robin Nisbet in favour of the identification.14 Yet it would be odd indeed if two different ladies of the same name should appear in one and the same book, both of them married in their time to rich poets, with Statius simply forgetting to distinguish them clearly from each other. The Polla now married to Pollius Felix is, then, almost certainly the same Polla whose earlier husband took part in the conspiracy of Piso and met the same end as his uncle Seneca. Statius presents her in language that suggests she is well suited to her second husband, living as she does the Epicurean life of pleasure and freedom from anxiety (Stat., Silv. 2. 2. 148–50): no cares, No threats have changed your brow, but always upon your face Is candid joy and pleasure that knows nothing of cares. And yet she will have known trouble enough in the past, when Lucan helped plot the murder of Nero in Piso’s villa, an estate perhaps even visible in the wide-ranging view from the splendid upper room in Pollius Felix’s own Surrentine villa. Tacitus tells us how Lucan disgraced himself in the end, babbling out the names of real or more or less plausible co-conspirators, including that of his own mother Acilia, in exchange for ‘impunity’ (Tac., Ann. 15. 56–7). Perhaps Nero went back on his word, but it is more likely that the promised impunity was merely the assurance that Lucan would be spared the disgrace of a public trial and the confiscation of his property that would follow formal conviction. In the end, like his uncle Seneca, he was accorded the opportunity to end his life honourably. His last act as he watched the blood flow from the veins that had been severed with more success than

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his uncle’s was to recite some lines of his own, describing the no doubt courageous death of a wounded soldier (Tac., Ann. 15. 70). In the account of another historian we might see this as the recovery of self-redeeming bravery at the last, but in Tacitus’ bitter narrative we might just as readily suspect sardonic condemnation of the vanity and self-importance of a foolish young man who had let himself get in over his head. Lucan, as Tacitus tells us, had once been Nero’s friend, but had feuded with him, and then, out of pique at Nero’s suppression of his poetry, had let himself get caught up in a conspiracy that turned into dangerous farce (Tac., Ann. 15. 49). Was Polla there to watch him die, as Paulina was at the side of Seneca? At any rate, Lucan’s whole family must have experienced considerable fear, wondering where the emperor’s desire for safety and revenge alike would carry him. Acilia was left unharmed, but also, says Tacitus, ‘without acquittal’ (Tac., Ann. 15. 71). The thought that punishment was merely suspended, was perhaps being kept in reserve, can hardly have been comforting, and the immense wealth of the family – we remember Juvenal’s description of Lucan composing at his ease in his ‘marble gardens’ – will have made them seem a vulnerable target. So much carnage in the ranks of Rome’s landed aristocracy could hardly fail to bring repercussions even without any further direct action on Nero’s part. Soon after Lucan’s death his father Annaeus Mela attempted to secure his son’s property, perhaps in itself an indication of his own financial worries at a time when the whole clan would be fearful for its security. He did so with fierce insistance, and a friend of Lucan’s, Fabius Romanus, surely dreading his own financial ruin, resorted to the false accusation that Mela too had been party to the conspiracy. Evidence was provided in the form of a forged letter purportedly written by the son to the father. Nero was shown the letter, and gave orders for Mela to be confronted with it. There could hardly have been any doubt how it would end, and, only the year after the discovery of the conspiracy, Mela, following the examples of his brother Seneca and his son, opened his own veins (Tac., Ann. 16. 17). Yet somehow Polla Argentaria came out the other side safe enough. The death of Nero only three years after her husband’s was followed by a vicious and bloody civil war, but with the emergence of the Flavian dynasty under Vespasian those connected with resistance to the rule of Nero could breathe more easily. The

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Flavians were upstarts with no deified ancestors occupying temples in the heart of Rome, and the denigration of the last of the Julian house contributed to the legitimacy of their claim to have delivered the nation from tyranny and chaos. Under their rule opposition to Nero could therefore be remembered as an honourable thing. Polla Argentaria also had wealth of her own, and used some of it, as it seems, to commemorate Lucan’s birthday with poetry from the pens of some of the most distinguished authors of the day. And so it was that Statius sang of how Calliope, muse of epic poetry, had greeted the birth of Lucan with joy, but joy mingled with her tears as she foretold his death (Silv. 2. 7. 100–4): Thus you too – the impious act of a raging tyrant – Will be bidden to plunge headlong into Lethe’s stream, And even as you sing of battles and, with lofty speech, Give comfort to the tombs of the mighty dead, You shall (O crime, O accursed crime!) fall silent. From high up on the cliffs close by Sorrento, Polla and the husband of her later years could look out upon a world of trouble, knowing all too well how fragile the security of anything outside the philosopher’s mind must be. Greek wisdom and Greek art, a life of quiet and serenity: these were things to be prized, and honoured in song. The Epicurean writings of Pollius have been lost, but the money spent by the wise and virtuous Polla has preserved in Statius’ hymn of praise the memory of Lucan as poet and victim, thereby adding to the condemnation of Nero. Memory is resistance too.

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3 Pliny and the Best of Princes: Worn Down by a Thousand Labours

What some might admire as a wise serenity was known to others by harsher names. The philosopher Seneca, who was so severe on himself that his emaciated body would not, when the time came, cooperate with his plans for a dignified suicide, could be just as hard on those of his peers and neighbours who did not even so much as aspire to meet his austere standards. Epicureans might think it wise to avoid the mad pursuit of status and power, but Stoics like Seneca respected engagement and service in the world in which divine providence had placed them, and men of Seneca’s class, wealth and education also found it natural to reconcile their Greek philosophy with the traditional obligations of high birth. Slackers could not hope to escape Seneca’s disdain, and otium was not the same thing as idleness. When a man was not busy with public duties, his leisure was not therefore to be considered honourable, or worthy of respect, if it was entirely self-indulgent and unproductive. In temporary retreat from society, a man could, in a villa, improve his soul; he could work, and work in ways that would bring him fame. In the collection of letters in which he muses on philosophical matters, and on how they inform the ordinary pursuits of his life, Seneca tells his friend Lucilius of an outing with which he appears to have attempted to enliven a seaside holiday on the Bay of Naples, not far from Cumae (Epistulae Morales (‘Moral Letters’)

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55). He does not say where he was staying, but a villa seems the likeliest location, and no doubt one that formed part of his own enormous property. He had himself carried out in a litter along a curving stretch of beach, so as to take the air without incurring fatigue. As he explains to Lucilius, however, such idleness proved every bit as tiring as a long walk would have been. To allow oneself to be carried any real distance is, paradoxically, ‘hard work’, both because it is unnatural and because luxury in itself afflicts us with weakness. The excursion brought him past the villa of Servilius Vatia, of whom we know only what we can learn from Seneca’s letter. Seneca calls him ‘a rich man of praetorian rank’, indicating that he must at some time in his life have had political ambitions, the praetorship being the second-highest senatorial magistracy in the Roman administration. At the time of writing Vatia was dead, but his ambitions seem to have been laid aside long before that. The sight of Vatia’s luxurious retreat above the beach leads Seneca to recall the dangerous times under the Emperor Tiberius, and he names Asinius Gallus and Sejanus, two famous casualties of that grim old cynic’s suspicious mind and unrelenting determination to hold on to power. Asinius Gallus had married Tiberius’ beloved wife Vipsania after he was, for reasons of state, obliged by the Emperor Augustus to divorce her in favour of marriage to Augustus’ daughter Julia. From Tacitus we learn that Gallus had also been one of those whom Augustus had considered as an alternative to Tiberius for his possible successor, only to decide that he was in fact as unsuitable for the job as he was eager to have it (Ann. 1. 13. 2). That was two strikes against him, and Tiberius, as he grew more autocratic and yet more impatient, had him arrested in ad 30 and then starved to death in custody some three years later. Aelius Sejanus, in contrast, had begun by winning Tiberius’ confidence, and for a time ruled Rome as the emperor’s representative while Tiberius withdrew from the world in yet another seaside villa, in his case on the island of Capri. Sejanus’ ambition to ally himself with the imperial house by marriage, however, proved his undoing, and Tiberius, suspecting that a coup was being planned, engineered his condemnation by the Senate and his execution in ad 31. Their ruin brought down with them many of their friends and associates, and, as Seneca tells us, people at the time would point the contrast between the dangers attached to ambition and the

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security that went with retreat from political life by declaring, ‘O Vatia, you alone know how to live!’ Certainly, Vatia had chosen himself a fine place in which to moulder. Seneca acknowledges that he has been unable to see much of the villa, and knows only what is open to public view. His brief description none the less communicates something of the size and luxury of the estate. It possessed two man-made caves, which were no doubt fitted with statuary like the grotto at Tiberius’ villa at Sperlonga further north along the coast, now famous for its elaborate sculptures illustrating such scenes from Homer’s Odyssey as the blinding of the cyclops Polyphemus. The theme of dominance over nature seen so often in the description of villas in Latin literature is present here too, as Seneca observes that one of the artificial caves excludes the sun entirely while the other keeps its rays until it sets, reminding us of what Statius told us of the upper room in the villa of Pollius Felix (Silv. 2. 2. 45–7). It also enclosed within its grounds a grove of plane trees, a river, and, like the villa of Hortensius at Bauli, its own fishponds. And, though the busy seaside resort of Baiae was, in Seneca’s phrase, ‘just on the other side of a party-wall’, the villa was secluded enough to be free from all the ‘inconveniences’ of such a place, by which he no doubt means, not least, the crowds and their vulgar hubbub. It was a fine place, then, in which to cultivate one’s soul, but wasted on Vatia, who, Seneca sharply observes, ‘did not in fact know how to live, but only how to lie hidden.’ The use of the Latin verb latere (‘to lie hidden’) is here polemical in tone, evoking as it does, especially in the context of the bilingual Greco-Roman culture of the Bay of Naples, the motto of Epicurus himself: lathe biosas, ‘live unnoticed’, troubling no one, opting out. Perhaps Vatia openly claimed allegiance to Epicureanism in order to provide himself with respectable cover for a life of playing it safe and avoiding public service, and even if he did not, we can sense the Stoic philosopher’s impatience with the school and its more opportunistic adherents. A philosopher was of course bound to do his best to live by the maxim on Apollo’s temple at Delphi, ‘Know thyself’, but a Roman aristocrat was also under an obligation to serve the state and his fellows, thereby making himself known to the world at large and to the generations still to come. Vatia, Seneca declares, ‘was known for nothing but the leisure in which he grew old’; he was no better than an animal hiding in fear, producing nothing, enslaved to his

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belly, to sleep, and to desire. ‘I never went past his villa,’ adds the philosopher, ‘when Vatia was still alive, without saying to myself, “Here lies Vatia.”’ Lies dead, that is, dead and buried, and in essence all but forgotten: as indeed he would be now, had it not been for Seneca’s contempt. A generation later another wealthy Roman would use a voluminous correspondence to present himself to the world and to define his place within it. In the Letters of Pliny the Younger, however, Greek philosophy is made to mind her manners, and the supremacy of traditional Roman aristocratic values and aspirations is celebrated with a studied modesty that can surely never have succeeded in fooling anyone. Pliny belonged to the provincial upper classes of Italy whom the settled rule of the Caesars had promoted from their old positions as local grandees to the rank of Roman senators and administrators of a world state. Principled service to the nation was the time-hallowed means of preserving and enhancing the rank and dignity that such men inherited with their estates. Under the Republic their duties and aspirations worked themselves out in the context of aristocratic competition for elected office and military command. The competition between aristocrats did not cease with the arrival of the imperial monarchy, but it was rendered less simple and more dangerous by the plain fact of the emperor’s supremacy, which made direct competition with him impossible and service to the state hard to separate from service to the man. Could honour and dignity be preserved when service was apt to slide into servility? It all depended, naturally, on the character of the emperor, and whether he was willing to observe the norms of the principate as established by its creator Augustus, whose veiled autocracy scrupulously upheld the rights and honour of the senators and respected their rank, assuring them of their place, if not as his equals, then at least as his partners in government. The fragility of the arrangement could be made clear by the worst of emperors through symbolic actions, as when Gaius Caligula made senators who had held the highest offices of state run for miles behind his carriage while encumbered by their togas (Suet. Cal. 26. 2). Or it could be put bluntly into words, as when Caracalla wrote to the Senate, telling them that he knew his conduct was not pleasing to them, but that it was precisely so that he could disregard their opinions that he kept arms and soldiers (Cassius

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Dio, Roman History 78. 20). Pliny had known such an emperor in Domitian, but it was his good fortune that his career reached its apogee under the Emperor Trajan. His Panegyricus, a formal speech thanking Trajan for nominating him to serve as consul in ad 100, draws a detailed and schematic contrast between the tyrannical behaviour of Domitian and Trajan’s civilitas, the unassuming behaviour of one who lays aside the trappings of majesty and acts like a fellow citizen (civis). What, asks Pliny with his addiction to studied paradox, could mark Trajan as citizen and senator more clearly than the fact that the Senate itself had voted him the title Optimus, ‘Best of Princes’ (Panegyricus 2. 7)? Men like Pliny, however, did not spend the whole of their lives, and not even the whole of their public lives, within Rome or in the presence of the emperor. They also had to balance carefully the competing demands of the capital where their careers were to be made and of the periphery where they had their estates, their extended families, and many of their ancestral clients. Each, no doubt, was at times a refuge from the other. Horace, another provincial boy, though one from further down the social scale, had acknowledged his own inconsistency in praising the quiet life in the country but somehow still feeling drawn to the bustle of the imperial city: ‘In Rome I long for Tibur, and, inconstant as the wind, in Tibur I long for Rome’ (Ep. 1. 8. 12). That fickleness, that gap between the noble ideal of contentment with the small pleasures of country life that he wanted to uphold and the lack of willpower that undermined it, is an essential part of Horace’s poetic self-characterisation. That is, it is closely bound up with the self-deprecation and self-knowledge that are fundamental to his poetic persona as someone entitled to give his readers friendly moral advice precisely because he knows and acknowledges that he shares their imperfections every bit as much as he shares their aspiration to live the good life. Pliny, on the other hand, seeks to present himself as a man with a clearer idea not only of what he values but also of the duty that requires him to deny himself the pleasures he longs for until he has earned them. How remarkable it is, he tells Minicius Fundanus (Ep. 1. 9), that the time one spends in Rome vanishes in the round of social obligations in such a way that, while every individual day can be accounted for in the memory accurately enough, no such account can be made for a run of days together. All days are spent in the same activities, and all days are

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thus alike: a man of Pliny’s rank spends them hurrying from one social function to another, from one young man’s coming-of-age ceremony to another’s wedding, from witnessing a will to advising magistrates in court. How necessary it all seems at the time, and how empty afterwards, when he has the leisure to retreat to his villa at Laurentum, a short ride outside the city on the coast of Latium. There at last ‘I either read something or write something, or give my body the care that provides the support that sustains my mind.’ Learn from my example, he tells Fundanus: leave the din and the pointless scurrying around behind you, and devote yourself to literature or to leisure (‘teque studiis vel otio trade’). The Letters when taken together as a collection, however, provide the necessary corrective to this fervent statement of the ideal. All those ceremonies were the glue that held the Roman governing élite together, as both Pliny and his readers knew, and all those hours spent pleading cases in court validated the claim of a conscientious class to rule the empire that their ancestors and the favour of the gods had put into their hands. Pliny gives us a glimpse of the earnestness that already marked him out as a boy of eighteen or so, when he tells us how he was staying in Misenum on the Bay of Naples, at the house of his uncle, in the August of ad 79 and on the very day that Mount Vesuvius erupted and engulfed the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii (Ep. 6. 16). The elder Pliny was at the time in command of the imperial fleet stationed there, and, as it was not yet clear how devastating the eruption would prove to be, he decided to head off in one of the fleet’s lighter, more nimble vessels so as to take a closer look and satisfy his scholarly curiosity. Asked if he cared to tag along, the young scholar replied that he preferred to continue with his studies, intending as he did to complete a composition exercise. That exercise had in fact been assigned to him by his uncle, himself the distinguished author of an encyclopedic study of the natural world and of a history of Rome’s military campaigns in Germany. When the severity of the situation became evident, the elder Pliny took charge of the rescue operations, and, while persevering in an attempt to bring to safety those trapped by the eruption, he died from inhaling the toxic fumes and ash thrown out by the volcano. This, then, was a family that aspired to literary glory, but one that also knew what was owed to patriotic duty and to self-respect. It was not a family in which the likes of Vatia would have felt at home.

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How fortunate, then, were those whose conscience could be reconciled with a leisured retirement that they had thoroughly earned, those whose right to withdraw from the world was sanctioned by custom and achievement. I really cannot recall ever spending my time more pleasantly, wrote Pliny to Calvisius Rufus, than I did on my recent visit to Spurinna (Ep. 3. 1). A peacable, well-ordered life is fitting for a man like that, Pliny argues, for a gentleman in his seventies with a distinguished career of service behind him. The life that Pliny describes Spurinna as leading is one of regular habits, of long walks, of rides in his carriage accompanied by his impeccably respectable wife, of reading and of discussing what he has read, of literary composition (in this case, of lyric poetry in both Greek and Latin), and of leisurely baths and good, unfussy dinners eaten in good, pleasant company and amidst good, educated conversation. Pliny is not utterly clear on the subject of where it is that Spurinna enjoys this cultured life of order and ease, but the references to three-mile walks in the morning and carriage rides later in the day seem to indicate that we are not in town but once more at a villa. Wherever it was, Pliny deeply envied it. How unlike my own life, he sighs: ‘Meanwhile I am worn down by a thousand labours, and this same Spurinna is for me both a comfort and a model.’ For Spurinna in his time had ‘fulfilled public offices, held magistracies, and governed provinces’, from which it follows that he had ‘earned this ease by dint of much labour’ (Ep. 3. 1. 11–12).1 Pliny himself would in his time hold an office in the state treasury and would later be charged with the important responsibility of maintaining the banks of the Tiber and hence with the prevention of the devastating floods to which much of Rome would otherwise be vulnerable. He would even reach the consulship, the apogee of the Roman civilian career, and would afterwards be appointed governor to Bithynia in Asia Minor. In all this his own career mirrored that of his admired Spurinna, and so it was that he could legitimately hope one day for the same release, like an old horse after a race, put out to grass at last and grateful for it: ‘I set myself the same course, the same finishing-post,’ he tells Calvisius Rufus, ‘and if you ever see me go on too far past it, call me to order with this letter, and tell me to rest when I have got free of the charge of idleness’ (Ep. 3. 1. 12). With Pliny, at any rate, there could be no realistic danger that a balanced life of the kind led by a Spurinna could gradually

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degenerate into the reprehensibly apolitical and uncultured selfindulgence of a Vatia. A still plainer statement of his personal ideal comes very early in the collection, in the third letter of the first book. Here we find him writing to an acquaintance in his home town of Comum, far to the north of Rome, in the lake country that lay in the shadow of the Alps. What he finds enviable in the position of his correspondent – another Rufus, as chance would have it, though in this case called Caninius Rufus – is not simply that his time is his own, but that he seems to be the kind of man who might well know how to turn it to account and, in the seclusion of his suburban estate, earn from the creation of literature the imperishable fame that others sought in politics or on the field of battle. Pliny imagines his friend taking his ease in his colonnade, and recalls with delight the picturesque stream that makes its way under the abundant shade of Caninius Rufus’ plane trees down to the lake, along with the villa’s dining rooms and sleeping quarters. Caninius Rufus is not, it seems, entirely free from the demands of society, as Pliny wonders if he is still for ever being called away on frequent trips to attend to his affairs. And yet Pliny counsels him to lay those ‘sordid cares’ aside, implying that freedom is within his reach if he can only find the willpower to grasp it. Although the description of the villa with which he opens the letter lists a mix of the amenities of nature and civilisation that would seem to speak more of sleep than of industry, none the less Pliny does not also counsel idleness. Write, he tells Caninius Rufus, shut yourself up with your books and write; fashion and hammer out something that will be yours for evermore. Everything else that you own in this earthly paradise will one day pass to other masters, but what you write will never cease to be yours. ‘Claim yourself for your studies,’ Pliny urges him, using a verb (adseris, Ep. 1. 3. 3) that was employed in legal formulations for setting slaves free: the trivial round of social duties is momentarily figured as servitude, than which no freeborn Roman could imagine any state more dishonourable or degraded. Not content with that hint, however fleeting, at a longing for revolution in the values of society that he himself served so diligently, Pliny proceeds to abolish completely the traditional distinction between public service and private leisure: write, he tells Rufus, and let writing be ‘both your negotium and your otium, your labour and your rest’ (Ep. 1. 3. 3).

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Pliny returns to the same ideas in another letter to Caninius Rufus in the next book (Ep. 2. 8). In this one he asks if Rufus is busy fishing, or hunting, or studying, for Lake Como and the seclusion of the area make all three as possible as they are desirable. He himself, Pliny declares, longs for them as convalescents long for wine, the baths and springs of cool water. Will he ever be free? He doubts it, and ends with a haunting description of his current labours, as new tasks are added to the old ones he has not yet finished: ‘With so many knots, so many chains, as it were, the train of tasks that fills my time stretches further and further every day’ (Ep. 2. 8. 3). The word here translated as ‘train’ (agmen) can be used of an army on the march, or of a team of pack-animals, but the detail of the knots and chains shows that Pliny is thinking instead of the most degraded kind of labour he could imagine. His endless days of service are a gang of slaves shackled together. If you draw your audience’s attention to that metaphor in the contemporary seminar room, you can be sure that someone will point out with indignant contempt that all of Pliny’s wealth and status owed its origins to a society and economy built on the real labour of real slaves. The point is a valid one, and does not become any the less so for being made, as it usually will be made, by those who are themselves the products of a society for whose fabulous wealth, egalitarian pretensions and tranquil security they can take no personal credit. Pliny lived in a grimmer age than ours, and for all we know may have kept his own agricultural chain gangs in subterranean dungeons of the kind recommended with chillingly callous, methodical detail by Columella: ‘For those in chains there should be an underground prison, as healthful as possible, and it should have lighting from very many narrow windows built so far from the ground that they cannot be reached by a hand’ (De Re Rustica (‘On Agriculture’) 1. 6). Pliny, indeed, hardly mentions the slaves who tended his fields and kept the house itself clean, and when he does allow them to appear, as in – to cite the best-known example – the famous description of his villa at Laurentum, it is as potential nuisances disturbing his concentration. He praises a remote bedroom in the villa as being one that ‘neither the voices of the young slaves nor the roar of the sea nor the noise of storms’ can reach (Ep. 2. 17. 22), raucous slave children being easily assimilated, in Pliny’s view of things, to uncooperative nature. An even more remote suite of rooms at the end of a terrace allows

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him to study in peace, neither himself getting in the way of his household as they raise the roof with the din of their celebrations at the Saturnalia nor in his turn being distracted from his work by the boisterous fun of others (Ep. 2. 17. 24). It is almost as if Pliny were obligingly helping those modern seminars along, so easy a game is it to note that if he, in his writing, leaves them firmly on the epistolary margins, then the slaves, at least in the context of a festival that, one day a year, gave them unusual freedom, physically marginalised their master on his own property. In her commentary on Statius’ description of the villa of Pollius Felix, Carole Newlands notes that the literature of villas ‘typically does not acknowledge the slave labour crucial to running the estate’,2 and observes that Statius instead converts the language of slavery to metaphor. As we saw when, in his upper room in Surrentum with its many windows and sweeping views, Pollius Felix ‘refuses to dismiss the light’, Statius credits him with a quasi-divine power, of a kind more normally attributed to a living emperor. Newlands, however, rightly points out how the language of the hierarchy of master and slave is also used to characterise the subordination of nature to human technology. The villas of men like Pliny and Pollius Felix are transformed by the literary imagination into something too grand for the brushes of housemaids and the floured hands of cooks, but they remain tangibly terrestrial for all that. The cultural ideal, however, is taken to its true fulfilment in the fantasy of the novelist. Apuleius tells how his heroine Psyche, abandoned on a clifftop as a sacrifice, was saved by being transported by the west wind, ‘the gently breathing Zephyr’, to a soft landing in a wondrous landscaped countryside. In this park was set a still more wondrous ‘royal house’ built of ivory, citron wood and gold that, as she would learn later, was the palace of Cupid. A ‘voice naked of its body’ invited her to step inside, and promised her entertainment within by similarly disembodied servants. When she had taken a bath, a banquet appeared, dishes heaped high with all kinds of food, along with wines like nectar, all provided ‘with no one serving it, just wafted on a breath of wind’ (Metamorphoses 4. 35–5. 3). In Roman literature, then, the best-run country house is one where the servants are invisible and everything seems to work by magic. Slavery underpinned Roman civilisation, as it had underpinned those of Greece and Egypt and as, much closer to our own

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time, it would one day underpin much of the wealth of Liverpool and Bristol. Literature was not exempt. The very scribes who made some of the earliest copies of Cicero’s works for distribution among his friends were slaves owned by his correspondent Atticus, and it seems likely enough that similar arrangements underlay much of the book production of antiquity. Like the Romans themselves, Roman political theory, Roman history and Roman literature care deeply about the relationship between the emperor and the aristocracy, or the relationship between the emperor and the mass of poorer free citizens; they rarely question – and do not question for long – the morality of slavery, just as they rarely doubt the fundamental justice of Roman conquest and rule. None of the readers for whom Pliny wrote would have expected the Letters to present them with the image of an egalitarian revolutionary. And in any case, all men with a decent conscience had their ‘thousand labours’, whatever their social rank or legal standing. The man we find in the Letters is none the less consciously fashioned and carefully edited with a view to winning our favour and admiration: a dutiful advocate and administrator, and a loyal upholder of the best traditions of his people and his class, but a kindly husband and patron too, and one with such a devotion to the arts, above all to the literary culture of the aristocracy of the high Roman Empire, as marks him out to serve as a fit guardian of the Roman peace and the civilisation it protected. It is true that most modern readers find Pliny a little comical at times, as when he tells us how his wife likes to attend his recitations, modestly screened by a curtain, and even learns his poetry by heart and sets it to music (Ep. 4. 19), or when he inveighs against the odious modern custom of grading one’s friends according to their social importance and serving them wines of different quality at dinner, only to spoil his own indignation by telling us that he himself shows his equal regard by serving them all, without exception, the cheap stuff (Ep. 2. 6). Against all that pomposity we should set the Pliny who makes fun of himself for combining villa life with literature by taking his writing tablets with him on a day’s hunting, just in case inspiration should strike him during the longueurs of waiting for the boar to come bumbling into the nets (Ep. 1. 6), as well as the Pliny who may skimp on his wine bill but who firmly refuses to insult his guests, insisting that those who had once been slaves are, when at his table, his equals

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(Ep. 2. 6. 4). Moreover, the value of what he says was, for him, inseparable from the refinement and harmony that distinguish the style in which he says it, for style is the man, and the polished and careful, yet intimate and humane Latin of the Letters is in keeping with the image of the Roman gentleman who can expertly balance hierarchy with familiarity and freedom with service. His graceful, translucent prose is deservedly admired by some modern scholars, and D. A. Russell gives good guidance to students in one standard handbook when he calls the letters ‘a model of ease and elegance … written with care for purity of language and rhythm.’3 The modern academy, however, is not always willing to concede as much. Contrast the judgement of John Henderson, who finds in the first letter to Caninius Rufus discussed above a description of ‘posh properties in posh phrases’,4 and holds up to ridicule Pliny’s ‘automatic-pilot “poetic” matching of noun to epithet to feature to psychic profile.’5 He condemns what he calls ‘fulsome regularity’6 and ‘platitudinous poise’,7 and invites the complicity of his reader in imagining that these supposed vices of Pliny’s style would also be found in anything that Caninius Rufus, in answer to his prompting, might compose: Ten-a-penny authors this way, Pliny gently prods friend Caninius – and, after this pen-portrait, we know too ‘what mind, what talent’ we are handling here.8 Yet Pliny’s Letters contain not a single sentence that in diction or rhythm could affront a sensitive ear, and that is something that cannot be said of the great bulk of contemporary academic prose. Note, too, in passing how easy it is to forget amidst the invective that Henderson’s condemnation of Caninius Rufus’ writing can never be gainsaid for the simple reason that not a word from Rufus’ pen survives against which to test it for truth or calumny. Whatever Rome was worth, it was men like Pliny who made the empire work. The quiet life of Horace on his small farm – the poetry, the friendship, the convivial discussions of literature – were all enabled and guaranteed by the imperial peace and the imperial bureaucracy that maintained it. And in all truth, Horace knew that well enough, and acknowledged it with a private ceremony on the occasion of Augustus’ return from war in Spain (Carm. 3. 14. 13–20):

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This day, for me true celebration, will remove Black cares: I shall not fear rebellion Nor death by violence while   Caesar holds the world. Go fetch the perfumed ointment, boy, and garlands And the cask that remembers the Marsian war If any jar succeeded in escaping   Marauding Spartacus. Both Horace and Pliny wanted otium at their villa, and the chance to write in peace. In practice, it was easier for Horace, a freedman’s son, to opt out than it could be for the nephew of the admiral of the fleet at Misenum, the owner of vast estates up and down Italy, the most distinguished citizen of Comum. Even when he was at liberty to visit his villas, a man like Pliny could not be wholly free of the demands of the community that depended upon him. When not governing Bithynia in the emperor’s name, he was fulfilling the role of a local emperor at home. For example, just as Trajan, ‘the Best of Princes’, had instituted the alimenta, a vast welfare scheme that provided food and education for orphans and the children of the poor, Pliny both provided the impetus and gave the initial donation for the founding of a school in his native Comum, saving the townsfolk the expense and ­inconvenience of sending their sons to distant Milan. At the time of the discussions which, as he reports in a letter to his friend Tacitus (Ep. 4. 13), he had with his neighbours on the subject, it is possible he was staying in the town, but it seems considerably more likely that he was in residence at one or other of the various villas he owned in the area. He had several on the lake shore, he tells Voconius Romanus (Ep. 9. 7), and was particularly fond of two which he playfully called Tragedy and Comedy in allusion to their respective elevated and low positions; one with a view over the lake from high up on a cliff, the other flush with the water’s edge. The acquisition of properties elsewhere in Italy also entailed further duties to other local communities. For example, we find him writing to his wife’s grandfather Calpurnius Fabatus in order to assure the old man that his granddaughter and he are as eager as Fabatus for the family to be reunited, and offering his excuses for a necessary delay while they take a detour to his estate

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in Tuscany (Ep. 4. 1). Close by, he explains, is the little town of Tifernum Tiberinum, which, when he was scarely out of boyhood, had secured his agreement to act as its patron. A great honour, no doubt, but one fitting enough for the local magnate, and by no means an empty compliment, since patronage entailed a wide range of duties that would make demands on both his money and his time. Pliny mentions the rituals of welcome with which the people greet his arrival, a small-scale version of the elaborate adventus ceremonies with which emperors and Roman governors were honoured on their arrival in the loyal cities of the empire. On this occasion he had to attend – and no doubt conduct – the ceremony for the dedication of a new temple, after which there was to be a banquet. Pliny tells us he supplied the funds for the construction of the temple, and it seems likely enough that he also paid for the banquet. The Tuscan estate was, as he assures another correspondent, Domitius Apollinaris, his favourite villa, at least among those near Rome and far from Comum. It was, at any rate, dearer to him than the one he owned at Tusculum (near modern Frascati, in Latium) – or the one at Tibur (Tivoli); or yet another one at Praeneste (Palestrina), a throw-away line that reminds us just how rich, and just how landed, the landed aristocracy of Rome at her imperial height could be (Ep. 5. 6. 45). This letter, along with the similarly detailed one on the Laurentine villa (Ep. 2. 17), constitutes Pliny’s most significant contribution to the literature of the Roman villa, and has justly attracted the attention of many readers for the detailed accounts not only of the architecture but of the elaborate gardens. Few scholars, however, pay similar attention to the emphasis Pliny lays on its healthy situation, away from the pestilential coast and safely placed in the foothills of the Apennines. Even his slaves, he notes at the very end of the letter, benefit; he adds, with apparent mild surprise, that none he has brought there with him on a visit has ever died (Ep. 5. 6. 46). It follows that the local people live long lives, and, in a very Roman twist of thought, Pliny adds that when talking to the elderly inhabitants of the area ‘you can hear the old stories and tales of our ancestors, and when you have come there you would think you had been born in another age’ (Ep. 5. 6. 6). That other age is one infused with Roman myth and ideology, the Golden Age that lingers in the countryside, the good old time of the ancestors who created the Republic, a time before emperors

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had ever come to rule. The point is made again with the observation that when he is there Pliny never receives any invitation from a neighbour of the kind that would require him to wear the toga, the formal dress of a citizen (Ep. 5. 6. 45). We should think, no doubt, of the round of family occasions and legal business he described as making all his days seem so frustratingly alike in his letter to Minicius Fundanus. When at the villa, he can relax, and in another letter, this time to Fuscus Salinator (Ep. 9. 36), he answers an inquiry from his correspondent about how he spends his days there. The answer is remarkably similar to the earlier account of the life of Spurinna in his retirement: Pliny wakes when he likes, and dictates some writing to his secretary; he works a little more on the terrace, then goes for a drive; he naps, takes a walk, and recites a speech for the good of his digestion; and as the day winds down, he takes another walk, does some exercise, has his bath, and spends the evening over a quiet family dinner with his wife and household, glad to have it seasoned with good conversation. If he also has to make some time to listen to the grumblings of his tenants, that is something he can easily bear: their ‘rustic complaints’ serve to remind him of the value of ‘our literary pursuits and the works of civilisation’ (Ep. 9. 36. 6). We find ourselves once more, perhaps, reminded of the fickleness and indecision expressed by Horace. Both city and country have their attractions, and if life in the country is desirable for Pliny, then that is because, in a mild paradox, it allows him the rest and freedom from distraction he needs to indulge in that most civilised of pursuits, the elaborate literature that was his class’s pride and the badge of their cultural status. In truth, the two worlds could never be kept entirely apart for long. In a letter written from distant Bithynia to the Emperor Trajan, Pliny reveals that he had received the permission of Trajan’s predecessor Nerva to put up in the temple in nearby Tifernum statues both of earlier emperors and of Nerva himself. He asks permission to add to their number one of Trajan (Ep. 10. 8). The Tuscan villa is the place where Pliny comes closest to the envied retirement of Spurinna, but even so the nearby community imposes upon its most distinguished local landowner demands that make of him a small-town emperor; and yet Rome with its world of high politics also intrudes, as Pliny feels obliged to demonstrate clearly his allegiance to the principate as a governing system and to Trajan as its current embodiment.

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This is not, at any rate, a life spent devoted to resistance of the kind planned by Piso and his fellow conspirators at the seaside villa on the Bay of Naples. Then again, neither is it consistently leisured. It is, instead, a life spent in keeping with the grand bargain between the Caesars and the old ruling class they had partially replaced but whose aid and support they still needed as generals and bureaucrats. In the panegyric with which Pliny recorded his gratitude to Trajan for raising him to the consulship – still the highest place of honour under the emperor himself that a citizen could hope to attain – the doctrine of the emperor as first among equals is laid out in a kaleidoscope of harmonious paradox (Panegyricus 2. 3–4): Nowhere should we flatter him as we would a god, nowhere as we would a divinity; for it is not of a tyrant, but of a fellowcitizen that we speak, not of a master, but of a father. He thinks himself one of us, and it is by thinking himself one of us that he achieves his excellence and pre-eminence. He remembers that he has command over men, and remembers also that he is himself a man. This was the display of both humility and belonging that marked Trajan out as a partner of the ruling class and not their master, as one truly worthy of the title ‘Best of Princes’ that they had given him. It was men like Pliny who enunciated the bargain, and kept it by playing their own part. When dynasties failed, it was from their class that new ones would be recruited. In the meantime, they could hope to shame and encourage emperors into living up to the ideal. Pliny’s rhetoric on his inauguration day in Rome and his encomium of the life of cultured otium at his villas combine to show how the aristocracy of Rome could retain both status and a degree of independence, and thereby how they could also resist the identification of the state with the prince. Pliny knew his duty, and when required he went off to govern Bithynia in the name of Trajan and of Rome. The tenth and last book of his Letters shows him dealing with all the usual business of a Roman imperial administrator, albeit with its local variations: oversight, for example, of the finances of cities whose competitive appetite for splendid public amenities had brought them to the verge of ruin, and the unusual proliferation both of Christians and of those determined to cause trouble for the new cult with the

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authorities. This last book preserves for us his numerous reports to Trajan, along with his requests for advice, or permission to act, or approval of actions already taken. The correspondence is formal and respectul on both sides, and the grand bargain between the emperor and the senatorial aristocracy is consistently on view, not least when, in one reply, Trajan gently, but perhaps with a touch of mild exasperation, tells Pliny to use his own judgement: ‘I chose you for your good sense,’ he says, ‘so that you could exercise restraint over the character of the people of your province’ (Ep. 10. 117). For all that, we hear nothing of Pliny’s life after his tour of duty. No letter informs us, for example, of his return to Italy to inspect in person Trajan’s statue in the temple at Tifernum, the temple that he had built with his own money to bind villa and town, patron and prince. Certainly, none shows him following Spurinna into a life of quiet retirement, out on his Tuscan estate, listening to his tenants telling him the ‘old stories and tales of the ancestors’ or taking another walk before his bath and the evening’s dinner. Perhaps, like many servants of many empires, he died, ‘worn down by a thousand labours’ and far from home.

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4 Juvenal and the Tyrant: Power Equal to the Gods

If the emperor was ‘one of us’ it could hardly be thought surprising if he, too, owned splendid villas in which to spend his leisure in a cultured fashion. Nor was it surprising if he sought to win glory in literature. True, such was his status that he could count on a measure of literary fame without any effort on his own part, as the recipient of dedications and verse eulogies from the pens of others. Some, however, wanted more, and would have sympathised with the swelling pride of Queen Victoria who, when copies of her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands were being bought up by an eager and loyal public, was gratified to hear from the lips of Mr Disraeli those precious words, ‘We authors, Ma’am’. Not every emperor aspired to authorship, but the catalogue of those who did is extensive, beginning with the first, Augustus. Suetonius (Aug. 85) records that he wrote mainly in prose, including works on philosophical subjects and an autobiography. His output in verse was, it seems, slighter, but Suetonius knew of a hexameter poem with Sicily as its subject, and of a book of epigrams. The latter, as befits work in a genre traditionally thought of as occupying a place very low down in the scale of seriousness, was largely composed during his time at the baths, the liminal period between the day’s business and the relaxation of the evening. Rome’s most successful epigrammatist, Martial, quotes a spectacularly obscene example of the Divine Emperor’s talent, six lines in elegiac couplets scathingly declining a supposed offer from

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Mark Antony’s wife Fulvia to transfer her attentions (Epigrams 11. 20. 3–8). Would we had more. Augustus’ grandnephew Claudius had ambitions to be an historian, and in his youth he wrote in Latin on the subject of the wars that followed the assassination of Caesar. That was rather too delicate a subject for the imperial family, however, and his mother Antonia and grandmother Livia persuaded him to give it up (Suet., Claud. 41). As emperor he wrote eight volumes of autobiography, which Suetonius thought lacking in judgement but not in elegance. Nor did he confine his talents to his native language, but wrote lengthy histories in Greek of two neighbouring peoples, the Etruscans and the Carthaginians (Suet., Claud. 42). Suetonius also informs us that he once presided over the Augustalia in Naples, probably in ad 42, an earlier celebration of the festival from which Statius had just come when he arrived at the Surrentine villa of Pollius Felix (Silv. 2. 2. 6–10). On that occasion Claudius submitted for the competition in Greek comedy a piece from the hand of his revered brother Germanicus, who had died over 20 years before. His fraternal piety met with its due reward when, in accordance with the instructions of the judges, he gave it the crown of victory (Suet., Claud. 11. 2). The most infamously literary Caesar was, of course, Germanicus’ grandson Nero. His poetry seems to have been diverse, ranging from personal invective against a citizen called Clodius Pollio (‘The One-Eyed Man’, Suet., Dom. 1) to a fullscale epic poem on the traditional material concerning Troy (Juv., Sat. 8. 221). Television presenters and professional academics alike habitually tell viewers and students that Nero was a poor poet and painfully self-deluded. There is some support for that judgement in Tacitus’ condemnation of the productions associated with Nero’s circle of literary diners as lacking in energy and inspiration (Ann. 14. 16). Suetonius, on the other hand, observes that Nero composed with such facility that it was sometimes said he passed other poets’ work off as his own (Nero 52), and, in the absence of anything other than a few competent-looking scraps by which to judge, the suggestion that his poetry was thought perhaps to have been ghost-written is as good an indication as any that at least some of his contemporaries saw merit in his work. Nero’s literary ambition, however, was not in itself what provoked objections, for to compose poetry had long been an acceptable leisure-time pursuit for men of the Roman upper classes. Rather, it was his monstrous vanity that aroused

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contempt, and, in particular, his shocking readiness to sacrifice the dignity of both his high position and his very manhood by appearing on stage, and even in competitions, like some low-born Greek professional singer. So it is that Suetonius records the most famous reproach posterity makes to Nero, that he saw in the disastrous great fire that devastated Rome in ad 64 the opportunity to give a performance: ‘Looking out upon this conflagration from the Tower of Maecenas, and rejoicing, as he put it, in the beauty of the flames, he sang from beginning to end, while dressed in his stage costume, his “Capture of Troy”’ (Suet., Nero 38. 2). Royal amateurs can be amusing at a distance, but they were perhaps more often frightening when dealt with close up. Aelius Spartianus, the pseudonymous biographer of Hadrian, fairmindedly notes the emperor’s talent for writing both prose and verse (Life of Hadrian 15. 10). He does so, however, in the context of assessing Hadrian’s vindictiveness towards those who crossed him, and his readiness to inflict scorn and ridicule on the learned men who could normally expect to be in some measure shielded from open disrespect by the prestige attached to their profession. Spartianus tells the story of how Hadrian found fault with some linguistic usage of the distinguished rhetorician Favorinus and of how the rhetorician’s friends later upbraided him for conceding to the imperial bully when, in point of fact, the word he had used was rendered irreproachable by its appearance in the works of authors of high repute. That they should have thought it possible for him to resist at all is in itself an indication of the extent to which literature and the scholarship that went with it were still thought of as lying outside the areas where the emperor’s word was law. Favorinus defused the tension with a joke: ‘You are giving me bad advice, my friends,’ he told them, ‘in not allowing me to believe that the man who is a better scholar than everyone else is the one who has 30 legions’ (Life of Hadrian 15. 13). The joke is funnier when read in isolation from the claim, just a few sentences before, that Hadrian had capriciously driven his own brother-in-law Servianus, then nearly 90 years old, to commit suicide. Lucan knew what it was to lose the friendship of a would-be imperial rival. Nero and he had been close at one time, and Suetonius records in his Life of Lucan that Nero had even shown his favour by conferring the rank of quaestor upon him. Lucan was the true boy-wonder of his day, however, whereas Nero could

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brook no rival. The emperor finally gave great offence by walking out on Lucan when he was giving a recital from his work, apparently for no other reason than to deliver a deliberate snub. Tacitus adds the detail that Lucan was driven into the Pisonian conspiracy by Nero’s subsequent pettiness and some kind of jealous ban on his performing (Ann. 15. 49). Some stories are more at home in Suetonius’ scurrilous biographies than in the severer pages of the historians, and it is to the Life of Lucan that we must return for the account of how, when he happened to be in a public latrine, Lucan once voided his bowels with unusual loudness, and marked the occasion by reciting a short snatch of Nero’s verse (Fragment 5 Courtney): You would think that it had thundered beneath the earth. Roman latrines had no cubicles, and their companionable patrons sat alongside each other on continuous benches with evenly spaced holes cut into them. The anecdote ends with those sitting near the author of this magnificent piece of lèse-majesté hurriedly finishing the task they had come for and scarpering in fear. And so it is that one of the few, tiny, surviving fragments of Nero’s poetry has made its undignified way down to us. It is a good story, and perhaps even a true one. Even so, it is easy enough to see how Lucan’s days were numbered. Emperors, then, could write their own poetry, subject the written work of their rivals to interdiction, and publicly embarrass by correction the learned professors who made their living from teaching others how to write. An emperor could also own a villa which might itself become either the subject of literary compositions or the site of poetic production, just as he might use it to make broad political and cultural statements in an attempt to set the terms in which his rule was to be understood. Augustus, as we saw, made a virtue of owning modest villas (Suet., Aug. 72. 3), just as he made a virtue of owning a modest house on the Palatine and of dressing simply and eating, when given the choice, like a peasant. This was a statement of the corresponding modesty of his political ambitions and of his reverence for the unaffected ways of the Romans of old. His villas, Suetonius remarks, were noted not for their collections of statues and paintings, but for their garden features. Not so with Hadrian over a century later. His vast villa

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at Tibur (Tivoli) was not only ‘the literal hub of empire, in that it became Hadrian’s favoured residence when he was in Rome, but … also a showcase of a highly Hellenocentric selection of what the empire had to offer.’1 Different parts of the estate bore the names of localities famous in the empire as centres of Greek culture, such as the Lycaeum of Athens and the Canopus of Egypt, while the vast collections of sculptures, not least of copies of famous masterpieces, ‘reconstituted the empire under the special conditions of a museum’s display, as it were.’2 There was more to this than a well-known globetrotter’s desire to reproduce at home the marvels he had seen on his many travels. The villa translated into physical reality an idea of the empire as a world where Greek art was blended with Roman imperial power, and hence one that flourished under the beneficent rule of an enlightened prince with impeccable cultural credentials. One of its treasures was a copy in marble of a famous classical bronze group of the Athenian lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton. In the traditionally accepted account it was their assassination of Hipparchus in 514 bc that helped spark the revolt that freed Athens from the rule of his brother, her last tyrant, and hence ushered in the remarkable experiment with democracy for which the city was renowned. It seems unlikely, however, that Hadrian was endorsing the murder of autocrats; but then, as we have seen, it was an important part of the grand bargain that the emperor, when honourable and just, was indeed no despot, but rather was to be considered as ‘one of us’. Radical Greek political ideals were being muted, or else had simply become obsolete. Under the wise rule of an emperor who recognised both male beauty and male heroism when he saw them – as well as knowing how to correct other people’s grammar – a little nostalgia for democracy was as harmless as it was quaint. Rather than associating the statues with such an odd, un-Roman way of arranging political affairs, visitors to the villa may in any case have been more inclined to reflect on how the statues related to other monuments on the estate. In particular, there was the Canopus, a long pool of water, ending in an elaborate garden pavilion partly covered by a domed roof, which in both name and decoration recalled the famous pleasure city to the east of Alexandria. Egypt was where Hadrian’s own lover, Antinous, had met his death by drowning on a boating expedition on the Nile in ad 130. Antinous, a fetching youth from Bithynia, where Pliny had been governor

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less than 20 years before, was remembered by the distraught Hadrian with the kind of outpouring of unrestrained emotion that would have shocked the dour Romans of the ancient Republic. Hadrian had him declared a god, and he was worshipped as an avatar of Osiris or else in the guise of Osiris’ approximate Roman equivalent, Bacchus. His statues filled the empire, including the villa, as those of the Prince Consort would one day fill the rooms of Osborne and Windsor in commemoration of Queen Victoria’s similarly extravagant grief. To mention just a single example, one bust, the Lansdowne Antinous, was taken from the villa in the late eighteenth century to grace the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. It is possible that one function of the Canopus at Tibur was to serve as a cenotaph commemorating the divine youth, four busts of whom formed part of its decorative statuary. A visitor putting all this together could read the tale of a world ruler as devoted to his lover as the Tyrannicides of Athens were to each other, but one who could surpass the fame they had earned by conferring upon his lover the eternal glory of divinity. At any rate, if there was little here of the democracy of classical Athens, neither was there much left of the old Roman Republic that Cicero, in retreat at his own villas, had fought so hard to preserve. The best-known imperial villa, at least in Roman literature, was not strictly speaking a villa at all, but a domus, a townhouse. That, of course, was the Domus Aurea, the ‘Golden House’, constructed by Nero in the vast spaces opened up by the Great Fire of ad 64. It stood in the very heart of Rome and straddled three of the seven hills – the Palatine, the southern parts of the Esquiline, and practically the whole of the Caelian. That was only part of its offensive transgression against custom and nature. Suetonius lays particular emphasis on its luxurious fittings, above all the decorations of gold and precious stones and the ivory-covered ceilings of the diningrooms, with their panels which could be turned so as to rain down flowers and perfume on the guests. He does so, however, only after impressing upon his reader the sheer size of the house and its ambiguous status as a country residence situated where the city should be (Suet., Nero 31. 1): Of its size and splendour it will be enough to record the following details. Such was its vestibule that in it there stood a colossal statue of the owner himself a hundred and twenty feet

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high. So extensive was it that it had triple porticoes a mile in length. Likewise there was a lake the size of a sea, surrounded by buildings that looked like cities. On top of all that there was the park, with a varied landscape of farmland and vineyards and pastures and woods, along with a vast number of every kind of domesticated and wild beasts. Size, opulence and the confounding of natural boundaries combined to make the Domus Aurea a monstrosity abhorrent to conservative Roman ideas of propriety. Nero’s ambition offered a direct challenge to a long tradition of opposition to building on such a lavish scale, expressed in a wide range of literary compositions. A century before, the historian Sallust had contrasted the unpretentious temples built by their ancestors with his own generation’s taste for ‘houses and villas built up like cities’ (Cat. 12. 3). Similarly, in an imaginary law suit Seneca the Elder makes a poor man rail against the arrogance of the rich who possess rural estates as large as cities, who fill actual cities with their massive houses, and who enclose entire lakes and groves within their buildings (Controversiae (‘Debates’) 5. 5). Nero’s palace, however, was seen as an aberration on the grandest scale, as ‘a transgression of the discrete boundaries of natura approved by Roman custom and upheld by moral rhetoric.’3 ‘And now in all the city there stood but a single house’, as Martial (Liber Spectaculorum (‘The Spectacles’) 2. 4) puts it, but the idea had already been expressed in Nero’s own day, in the lampoons that did the rounds of a disgruntled populace (Suet., Nero 39): Rome shall become a single house. Time to move to Veii, you citizens of Rome!    – Unless Veii has become another annexe to that house.4 Emperors could raise their boyfriends to the status of divinity, but there were still some limits to what the touchy Romans would endure. They knew what belonged to them, and knew how to assert their rights. Pliny the Elder (Nat. Hist. 34. 62) records how Nero’s predecessor Tiberius had a particular liking for a magnificent statue by Lysippus, the ‘Apoxyomenos’, which depicted an athletic young man cleaning himself up by using a strigil to scrape the dust and sweat from his body. It had been

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set up by Nero’s great-grandfather Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa in the baths he had built for the people on the Campus Martius, but Tiberius – Agrippa’s own son-in-law – had confiscated the statue and moved it to his private bedroom. The people would have none of it, and shamed the emperor publicly by loudly demanding its return when he attended the theatre. Tiberius gave in, but Nero was slow to learn the lesson of self-restraint or to take to heart the knowledge that the people could only be pushed so far. Within five years of the Great Fire Nero was dead, and the dynasty of the Julio-Claudians had been replaced by the Flavians. Marking themseves out as different from their discredited predecessors, as well as more respectful of tradition, was an essential part of the Flavians’ propaganda. The Golden House was abandoned and covered up, with a new public bath-house built on top of part of it, while the great lake was drained to provide the ground for that quintessentially Roman manifestation of communal identity, the Colosseum. When Domitian, the third and last of the Flavians, had his own magnificent new palace constructed in Rome by his favourite architect Rabirius, unlike Nero he had the wisdom to restrict it to the traditional aristocratic, and later imperial, quarter, the Palatine Hill. Similarly, his country villa was situated in the kind of area a country villa should be, out in the Alban Hills, about 13 miles from Rome. Two principal phases can be distinguished: one of Republican date which may even have been, as Coarelli notes,5 the villa where Cicero made his unsuccessful application for Pompey’s help, and one of the first century which was, in all probability, another of the achievements of Rabirius. It was lavish indeed, spreading over three terraces and commanding a magnificent view over the Alban Lake, and possessing, in addition to the usual courtyards, baths and gardens, such amenities as a private theatre and a vast cryptoporticus. It seems to have been Domitian’s preferred residence when he was not in Rome itself, and he used it for a wide range of activities. Suetonius tells us, for example, of how he would relax there by employing his considerable skill as an archer to slaughter ‘hundreds of wild beasts of various kinds’ during staged hunts before spectators. These seem to have been a version of the kind of venationes that, as emperor, he would give in the capital for the people on the occasion of state holidays (Dom. 19). It is worth stressing that Domitian, perhaps mindful of the opprobrium that Nero attracted by literally

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making a public spectacle of himself, limited his role as an actual participant in the performances to a private residence and a select audience. Of particular interest is the college of priests and special games that Domitian instituted at the Alban villa in honour of the Quinquatrus, the five-day festival in March of his patron goddess Pallas Minerva. On these occasions men ‘chosen by lot served as officers of the cult, and put on magnificent hunts and staged dramatic performances, along with competitions between orators and poets’ (Suet., Dom. 4. 4). We should remember here the games instituted by Pollius Felix on his Surrentine estate in honour of Hercules (Statius, Silv. 3. 1. 139–62). It can be taken as read that the emperor’s games were on a much more lavish scale, but in holding them where he did he was acting, like Pollius Felix, as a private citizen expressing at his private expense a personal devotion to a patron divinity. These more intimate occasions therefore differed in status and function from the great national competition that he also instituted in Rome itself, the Capitoline Games in honour of the patron god of the city, Jupiter of the Capitoline, Best and Greatest of the gods, which Suetonius describes in the same section of his biography. It was the great disappointment of Statius’ career that he never succeeded in winning the Capitoline crown for poetry (Silv. 3. 5. 31–3 and 5. 3. 229–33), just as it was the high point of that career that he had been crowned by the emperor himself at the Alban contest, probably in ad 90 (Silv. 4. 2. 65–7):6 The day when, beneath the hills of Trojan Alba, As I sang now of German wars, and now of Dacian battles, Yours was the hand that placed upon me Minerva’s gold. As Coleman argues, Statius seems to mean that his winning entry was an epic celebrating the emperor’s victories over the Chatti in southern Germany in the winter of ad 89 and over the Dacians later the same year, for which he had celebrated a double triumph. Both Suetonius (Dom. 2. 2 and 20) and Tacitus (Hist. 4. 86) sniff their disdain for Domitian’s interest in poetry, with the latter going so far as to present it as a deliberate pose designed to compensate for an awkward and sullen young man’s inability to compete with the family star, his glamorous brother Titus. Against the confidence with which Tacitus expresses his own cynicism,

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however, we must set the evidence of the continued support that Domitian gave to the arts in both Rome and Alba through his games with their poetic competitions. The poet Valerius Flaccus even reveals that Domitian in fact wrote what seems to have been an epic poem on Titus’ victories in the Jewish revolt (Argonautica (‘The Voyage of the Argo’) 1. 12–14), while Martial (Epigrams 5. 5. 7) mentions ‘heavenly songs’ apparently written by Domitian on the subject of the siege of the Capitoline Hill during the civil wars following the death of Nero. No doubt we should not take too literally the courteous regret of Quintilian that cares of state had prevented Domitian from fulfilling his destiny as ‘the greatest of poets’ or the claim that nothing could be ‘more sublime, more learned, more outstanding in every detail’ than what he had written before taking the throne (Institutio Oratoria (Institutes of Oratory) 10. 1. 91). Similarly, in the preface to his unfinished poem on the life of Achilles, Statius duly addresses the emperor as one for whom the twin laurels of victorious poets and victorious generals flourish in rivalry. His claim, moreover, that both Italy and Greece were in awe of Domitian’s talent subtly implies that the emperor composed verse in both languages (Achilleid (‘The Song of Achilles’) 1. 14–16). Contemporary archaeology dramatically confirms this detail. Work carried out digging tunnels for a new underground railway line at Naples in the opening years of the present century has brought to light a temple that seems likely to have been the centre in the city of the cult of the emperors. Close by the temple there once stood another building with a portico attached, and from the marble panels of the inner wall of this colonnade there now survive hundreds of fragments of inscriptions recording the names of victors in the various competitions at the Augustalia. The inscriptions are all in Greek, in keeping with the character of Naples as a Greek colony. It is also entirely in keeping with the character of the Augustalia, which, as one of the handful of festivals considered equal in status to the Olympic Games, attracted competitors from far and wide in the Greek-speaking world. Domitian’s name appears several times, amply documenting his involvement in the Augustalia in three different capacities: as agonothetes (‘president’ or chief official overseeing the games), as the recipient of praise in panegyrical compositions in both prose and verse, and as a successful competitor, winning crowns for chariot-racing and for encomium of his brother, the Divine Titus.7

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It was at the Augustalia, as we have seen, that Statius had been competing before his arrival at the villa of Pollius Felix, and he tells us elsewhere of his own victory at the games in his eulogy for his father, another victor in the same festival (Silv. 5. 3. 225–7). Domitian, then, was not only Statius’ most important patron, but also a fellow poet and encomiast who, like Statius himself, had been crowned with a garland of Ceres’ corn ears in the most important Greek cultural festival held on Italian soil. Such competition poetry, however, was written ex tempore, for a given occasion, and in huge quantities; it will often have been rather run of the mill in quality. It is therefore not surprising that it rarely survives to the present day. The Alban villa itself, however, leaves some remarkable traces in the high literature of Domitian’s reign and of the decades that followed. That written when Domitian was still alive is, unsurprisingly, complimentary in tone, as when Martial dedicates the fifth book of his Epigrams to the emperor as holiday reading and imagines him in residence at one or other of his summer retreats, among which pride of place is given to ‘Palladian Alba’ (5. 1. 1). Martial’s phrase learnedly associates the villa first and foremost with Pallas Athena, as the Greeks called Minerva, and hints at the joint devotion to the patron-goddess of the arts that unites the poet with his addressee. Statius in his turn twice connects Domitian with ‘Trojan Alba’ in the Silvae (4. 2. 65, 5. 2. 168), alluding to the patriotic tradition that named Ascanius, son of Aeneas of Troy and ancestor of the Julian family, as the founder of the city of Alba Longa from which, in time, Romulus and Remus would come to found Rome itself. Statius thereby stresses the close link between the site of Domitian’s villa and the history of the Romans as a nation, but he elsewhere also makes clear the personal association that his family and he himself enjoyed with Alba. We learn in particular that Statius had a country retreat of his own in the area, apparently supplied with water by the gift of the emperor, which is most likely to mean that Statius was allowed the privilege of drawing from the same source that fed the imperial villa (Silv. 3. 1. 61–4). Moreover, it was in a tomb on this estate that his father, a distinguished poet and teacher who had almost certainly counted Domitian among his many aristocratic pupils, was buried (Silv. 5. 3. 36–40).8 Once dead, however, Domitian was fair game, and neither Tacitus nor Juvenal was the kind of man to hold back. Brian

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Jones points out how both the historian (Agricola 45. 1) and the satirist (Sat. 4. 145), in referring to the Alban villa by the term arx (‘citadel’), evoke the conventional picture of the wicked tyrant up in his fortress on a beetling precipice, a lair from which he or his henchmen would occasionally descend in order to inflict outrages upon a helpless populace.9 Juvenal’s readers might well remember how another of his satires even depicts the lurid scene of a generic ‘tyrant in his savage citadel’ castrating beautiful youths reserved for his unspeakable lusts (Sat. 10. 306–7). It is in fact Juvenal’s fourth Satire that offers us not only the most memorable literary picture of Domitian on his Alban estate but also the most scathing denunciation of his entire reign and of the perversity of tyranny. Juvenal makes us come at the subject obliquely, by first fixing our attention on the half-monstrous and half-ridiculous character Crispinus, a low-born Egyptian who has wormed his way into the emperor’s good graces and become both fabulously rich and a member of his private council of advisers, the Consilium Principis. Crispinus exhibits all the crass extravagance that is to be expected, in Roman satire, of a parvenu millionaire with more money than taste, and wins notoriety by forking out thousands for a prize delicacy in the form of an outsize fish, a red mullet weighing six pounds. The suggestion that one absurd aberration of nature is bound to appeal to another hangs in the air for a moment or two, but Juvenal quickly moves on, wondering to what disreputable purpose the wily Crispinus can have put such a luxurious item. Was it to serve as a gift with which to win the affection of some childless old man who might fondly remember Crispinus in his dotage and leave him his property, a big fish serving as bait for a larger catch? Or as a gift for an upper-class mistress who had to be kept sweet with the very best of everything? Not a bit of it: ‘Don’t expect anything of the kind. He bought it – for himself’ (Sat. 4. 22). So debased is the age of Domitian that a creature like Crispinus prefers, even to money and sex, the satisfaction of base gluttony in the context of conspicuous consumption. Thoughts of gluttony and vulgar ostentation lead naturally, in Juvenal’s bitter thoughts, to Domitian. If his minions ate like this, what kinds of extravagant dishes would the emperor himself guzzle down? He then summons the aid of the Muses, to tell a remarkable tale that will make the degeneracy of the age as clear as anyone could wish. Early in the winter, in the waters just off

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Ancona, a fisherman catches in his nets ‘the astounding mass of an Adriatic turbot’ (Sat. 4. 39). Turbot was an established luxury of the Roman table, but its price prohibited its consumption in large quantities: Juvenal’s great predecessor in the genre of satire only had his first taste of it at a banquet given by another rich social climber, Nasidienus (Hor., Sat. 2. 8. 30). This monstrous turbot, however, is said to have been as large as the fish that are ‘concealed beneath the ice of the Sea of Azov in winter’ and then, when the ice melts, come down through the Black Sea towards its mouth at Byzantium (Sat. 4. 41–4), and those fish are surely the enormous tunny that Pliny the Elder records as having been regularly caught in the narrow waters there as the current swept them towards the Mediterranean (Nat. Hist. 9. 51). As Pliny also tells us that such tunny were ‘of exceptional size’ and could weigh as much as fifteen talents, or roughly a thousand pounds (Nat. Hist. 9. 44), it is clear enough that Juvenal has brought us deep into the territory of satirical hyperbole. The fisherman instantly realises that so wondrous a catch can hardly be sold on the open market, not least because it would be instantly confiscated by the ever-rapacious imperial treasury. He therefore decides it shall go straight to the emperor as a gift, his inevitable loss turned, perhaps, to credit by imperial gratitude. Luckily, it is cold enough for the fish to keep fresh as he hurries it down from one side of Italy to the other, across the Appennines, and up along the Via Appia to Domitian’s villa which stands (Sat. 4. 60–1) where Alba, though in ruins, Keeps safe the Flame of Troy and worships the lesser Vesta. The allusions are to the ruins of Alba Longa and to the sacred flame of Troy which Alba’s founder Ascanius had brought there, just as his father Aeneas had earlier brought it from Troy to Italy. Likewise, the fisherman passes by the ancient temple of Vesta, here called ‘lesser’ to make clear her status as the country cousin of the far more splendid dwelling of the goddess in the Forum at Rome. For a line and a half we are back in the world of the Aeneid, of heroic virtue, and of rustic simplicity and piety. By the next line, however, we are once more in the pushing, bustling, venal, contemporary world we know all too well as we see the fisherman

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jostled by the awe-stricken crowds milling around in the villa, while the line after that shows the doors opening to the imperial audience chamber. In he goes, and for all that he may appear to be a simple fisherman, he is swift enough with his wits and tongue to know how to flatter (Sat. 4. 65–71): ‘Accept,’ he said, ‘What is too large for private hearths. Let this day be spent As holiday. Make haste to loosen your belly with feasting, And consume a turbot that was reserved for your own Age. The fish itself did wish to be caught.’ What could be more blatant? And yet In pride up rose his crest. There is nothing that power equal to the gods Cannot believe of its own self when it is given praise. A fish so large cannot be accommodated even by existing imperial crockery, so the emperor summons his council of advisers. A large section of the poem sardonically describes them, alluding to their various fates and vices, and dwelling on the speeches by which they make their own contribution to the grandiloquent flannel. The deliberations result in a decree commissioning an appropriately vast dish in which to cook the turbot, along with a rider that henceforth a squadron of potters should be added to the emperor’s household. The satire is funny enough as a parody of pompous epic and as an indictment of both the language and the practices of a corrupt régime. One particularly unforgettable line describes how the fisherman and his catch are allowed to jump the queue of senators waiting to be admitted to Domitian’s presence: ‘their lordships, shut outside, look on as the fish-course is admitted’ (Sat. 4. 64). There is a real edge, however, to the absurdity, and not just in Juvenal’s concluding remark that the emperor had ‘dragged them’ all the way from Rome to deal with something so trivial in the same way he might have done had he been about to come to some decision regarding foreign and military policy, and so ‘to pronounce on the Chatti and the wild Sygambri’, or else to communicate the contents of a missive from the furthest reaches of the empire (Sat. 4. 145–9). The holding of the council, not on the Palatine in Rome, but outside the city in what should be a vacation retreat combines with the

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emperor’s high-handed treatment of his supposed peers to give us a picture of a world turned upside-down. The point is driven home when, in the list of counsellors, Juvenal comes to Plotius Pegasus, the ‘Prefect of the City’ or head of the police and justice departments of Rome. Juvenal denies him his ancient and venerable title, substituting for ‘prefect’ the word vilicus, that is ‘estate manager’ (Sat. 4. 77). The holder of this less exalted office was usually a slave in charge of other slaves, and in using the offensive term Juvenal indicates what Domitian thought of the people he governed. More than that, however, the word evokes the countryside, for the vilicus was properly speaking the overseer of a villa. The world, then, is governed not from the heart of the imperial capital, but from the autocrat’s country retreat, while Rome has been relegated to the status of a rural backwater. This perversion of the correct order of things adds retrospective force to what we were told in the opening lines of the poem, that the Crispinus who paid thousands for his fish had also bought mansions so vast that they covered entire acres of land near the Forum itself (Sat. 4. 5–7). Just as Domitian in his tyranny is scathingly dismissed by Juvenal as ‘the bald Nero’ (Sat. 4. 38), so even his toadies recall the owner of the Golden House. Yet the fourth Satire of Juvenal had even more of a bite for its Roman audience. Among the ancient scholia offering information on, among other things, the various characters who appear in the catalogue of counsellors is one that makes it clear that we are dealing, not merely with a general parody of the genre of contemporary epic honouring the emperor, but with parody of one poem in particular, the lost epic On the German War. A sample is quoted, of just four lines, but enough to let us see that it forms part of a larger catalogue, and it names three of the same men who appear in Juvenal to share with Domitian their wise advice regarding the cooking of the giant fish. The author, as the scholiast tells us, is Statius, and so it is that we find ourselves recalling the poet’s pride in the glory of ‘the day when, beneath the hills of Trojan Alba,’ he ‘sang now of German wars, and now of Dacian battles’ and was crowned in gold by the emperor himself (Silv. 4. 2. 65–7). Statius died, as it seems, before Domitian. He had no opportunity to sing his recantation. He might in any case have preferred silence, finding distasteful the job of distancing himself from a generous benefactor who had also been, in all probability, his father’s pupil and a fellow victor at the Augustalia. Juvenal, on

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the other hand, appears to have belonged to another generation, and there is no reason to believe that he owed Domitian anything. The Senate might decree that the memory of Domitian should be damned to oblivion, and dutiful workmen might chisel his name from the victors’ lists in the temple of Augustus at Naples. All that, however, was primarily an act of political symbolism, the revenge of the class, the ‘us’, from whom he had estranged himself. His memory indeed lives on, but does so as the foil, in Pliny’s Panegyricus, to the virtues of Trajan, ‘best of princes’. And that memory is also recast in poetry by Juvenal, who shapes his brilliantly mordant satire from the base clay of vainglorious epic. In the fourth Satire, Domitian, walled off from reality in his Alban retreat, becomes the monstrous victim of his own conceit, as he and his villa, along with the poetry that by its egregious flattery had won his favour, are all preserved together, exposed for evermore to mockery and contempt.

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5 Romans, Gauls and Christians: Mine is No Barbarous Land

None of the prominent courtiers summoned to the Alban villa to debate, with such ludicrous solemnity, the grave affair of the uncooked giant fish is immune from the lash of Juvenal’s satire. Among the counsellors said to have been present on that occasion was Cornelius Fuscus, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, who, by virtue of his office, was responsible for the emperor’s personal safety. There was good reason for Domitian to consider his loyalty assured, since he had been an early and an enthusiastic supporter of Domitian’s father Vespasian in the civil wars that broke out after the death of Nero and, in his capacity as commander of the imperial fleet at Ravenna, he had been instrumental in winning control of Italy for the new dynasty (Tac., Hist. 2. 86; 3. 4, 12). He would later die far from home, while on campaign against the Dacians (c. ad 86), leading the men of the Fifth Legion, the ‘Larks’, when they were disastrously ambushed by King Decebalus. More generous spirits would see in all this the ancient virtues of the ancestors, and would laud Fuscus’ patriotism and heroism in war. Juvenal, however, is content to denigrate both his military skill and his death (Sat. 4. 111–12): And Fuscus who, planning battles in his marble villa, Was saving his entrails to feed the vultures of Dacia.

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He was a dilettante general, Juvenal suggests, who would have been better off if he had stayed in his villa, as safe and as comfortable as Lucan was in his ‘marble gardens’ (Sat. 7. 79–80) before youthful folly and aristocratic pride drove him to join Piso’s conspiracy against Nero. Yet Tacitus, for all that he thought Fuscus too fond of danger for its own sake, none the less acknowledges his courage, and Martial honours him with a dignified epitaph (Epigrams 6. 76). Personal ambition played its part, of course, along with a sense of what was regarded by men of their class as necessary to their own self-respect. Even so, it was generals and administrators like Fuscus and Pliny who kept the imperial peace under which, as the centuries went by, Rome ceased to be a single city and became an ideal of universal belonging. Those with an Olympian perspective could perhaps afford their moments of lofty detachment, as when Tacitus cast a jaundiced eye over the success won by his own father-in-law Julius Agricola in making little Romans out of conquered Britons during his time as governor of the province. Agricola encouraged them to build ‘temples, market-places and town-houses’, and to adopt Roman customs with such enthusiasm that they willingly wore the toga and sent their chieftains’ sons to learn the liberal arts. The poor innocents, Tacitus observes, thought that this was ‘civilisation, when it was in fact just another feature of their enslavement’ (Agricola 21). There is little sign that any of the Romano-Britons, as they now became, felt abashed in the face of such metropolitan scepticism. In addition to the urban amenities listed by Tacitus, the acceptance of Roman ways and the Roman style of living was made visible in the spread of villas with stout stone walls and tiled roofs and mosaic floors. With Roman building materials came Roman myth and Roman literature, as seen, for example, in the mosaics from the villa at Low Ham in Somerset, with their illustrations of the love story of Aeneas and Dido as told by Virgil in the first four books of the Aeneid. The ideal of cultivated otium no doubt shaped the ways in which the villa owners of Britannia both understood and explained their place in the social and political hierarchy of the larger empire, but the literary record of Roman Britain is too sparse to provide us with detailed evidence.1 For that we must turn to Gaul. The southern reaches of Gaul along the Mediterranean coast had been Roman territory since the late second century bc.

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Following the Greeks, whose colonists had established Marseille and Nice long before, the Romans spread both the reality and the ideal of the classical city. Their own foundations included such colonies as Forum Iulii (Fréjus), the birthplace of Agricola, that wily missionary of Roman culture. The conquests of Julius Caesar in the middle of the first century bc, however, had brought under Roman rule the much vaster territories to the north bounded by the Atlantic, the English Channel, the Alps and the Rhine. This was wilder country, and the process by which its inhabitants, the strange and semi-barbarous ‘long-haired’ Gauls, adapted to a new identity as first Roman subjects, then Roman citizens, and by which the Latin language, Roman law and Roman urban life were established, was a long and complicated one not always easily deciphered in the historical and archaeological record. Some Gallo-Romans strode proudly across the stage of imperial politics, such as Gaius Iulius Vindex, a descendant of the kings of Aquitania who, as governor of Gallia Lugdunensis, revolted against Nero in ad 68, thus initiating the sequence of events that led to the end of the dynasty founded by Gaul’s conqueror. Most, however, will have stayed near their ancestral lands, leaving a more local record, in the Latin epitaphs on their tombstones and, inevitably, in the remains of the great villas they built with the wealth accumulated under the Roman peace. Some of these, especially in the south, were built on a scale familiar to us from the description that Pliny gives us of his Laurentine estate, such as Chiragan in the Haute-Garonne near Toulouse, with its scores of rooms, its baths and hypocausts, its mosaics and a remarkable collection of sculptures, prominent among them a series of portrait busts of Roman emperors.2 Those imperial busts might in principle be thought to tell us nothing more revealing about their owner than that he had a taste for celebrity, but they are more plausibly interpreted as evidence for the loyal identification of the Gallo-Roman élite with the new order. By the fourth century the habits of loyalty had become deeply ingrained, and they were reinforced in troubled times by the knowledge both of what it was that Roman rule still sought to guarantee and of the dangers that now threatened it from beyond the northern frontiers. During the two centuries that straddled the end of direct imperial rule in Gaul and the establishment of the kingdoms of the Goths and the Franks (c. ad 370–570), the voice of this class can be heard in a remarkable outpouring of ingenious

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and learnedly allusive writing that redeploys the villa literature of Statius and Pliny to express its allegiance to traditional Roman cultural ideals. At the same time, that literature cannot help but reveal how much had changed. Even in the fourth century there remained a sense that the south of Gaul was more civilised, more Roman, than the north. Ausonius, the first of the great Gallo-Roman poets whose works survive, plays upon those assumptions when, in his Ordo Urbium Nobilium (Catalogue of Famous Cities), he leaves behind the great cultural centres of the Mediterranean and comes in its turn to his native city of Burdigala (Bordeaux). Ausonius contrasts its situation in the rich lands of Aquitaine with the northern extremities of the world, both the other end of his native Gaul and Mount Haemus in still more distant Thrace (Catalogue of Famous Cities 133–7): Mine is no barbarous land Beside the Rhine, nor have I an icy home on northern Haemus. Bordeaux is my native soil, where the skies are mild and clement, And generous is the bounty of the well-watered land, Where spring is long, and winters are warm with the new-risen sun. The ‘barbarous’ land on the banks of the Rhine, the empire’s northern frontier, is made to serve as the antithesis of the high Roman culture of fourth-century Bordeaux, the home of all those eminently civilised beings, the professores of grammar and rhetoric whose praises Ausonius sings in another of his collections. Ausonius also reminds his learned audience of another great centre of culture, this time far to the south and east, for behind his phrasing there is a fleeting but powerful evocation of one of the Silvae of Statius. Exhorting his wife Claudia to acquiesce in his plan to leave the bustle of Rome and retire with him to his native Naples, Statius speaks of a city famous for its theatres and porticoes, a place ideally situated in a climate of unparalleled mildness (Silv. 3. 5. 81–4): This is the home (for neither barbarous Thrace Nor Libya is my native soil) to which I strive to transport you,

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Tempered by both gentle winters and cool summers, Which is washed with unhurried waves by a peace-loving sea. Some years earlier, in the mid-360s, Ausonius had in fact been compelled to forsake lovely Bordeaux for the chilly Rhineland that he here disparages. The Emperor Valentinian I had made his capital in the city of Trier, a convenient place from which to keep an eye on the dangerously porous frontier. Valentinian’s son Gratian needed a tutor, and Ausonius, who had taught for three decades in the schools of Bordeaux, was accounted among the best. When the irascible Valentinian died in ad 375 of a stroke brought on by rage at what he perceived as insufficient respect for his imperial dignity on the part of some barbarian ambassadors, Gratian succeeded. The young prince showed his affection and confidence in his tutor by keeping him in Trier for several years longer, raising him to the rank of praetorian prefect, or governor, of Gaul and conferring upon him the still highly valued honour of a consulship in ad 379. To this period of his life belongs Ausonius’ most famous poem, a description of the river Moselle and of the lands and cities, and also the villas, that lay around it. Then his theme was the charm of the gentle countryside on either side of the river, and how it reminded him of home (Mos. 18–22): Indeed, the whole sight with its delightful prospect struck me As seeming just like my own country, sparkling Bordeaux: The rooftops of the villas, placed high up on the overhanging banks, The hills green with vines, and the pleasant streams Of Moselle gliding below, their murmuring silenced. The description includes details that had long been regular features of the set-piece locus amoenus, ‘the delightful spot’, that is found in all kinds of Latin poetry and in all periods, a place of trees and water and rustic calm and harmony. Amid the natural charms of the valley, however, Ausonius gives a special place to the villas, a refinement added to nature by Roman civilisation. The ‘rooftops of the villas’ might also remind Roman readers how the first of Virgil’s poems, one of particular importance in the ancient educational canon, ends with the disruption of civil war and brutal dispossession temporarily suspended when one shepherd is moved

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to offer another hospitality as the night comes down (Eclogue 1. 82–3): And now far off the rooftops of the villas send out their smoke And longer fall the shadows from the lofty mountains. Ausonius expands this brief reference to the villas of the Moselle valley later in the poem, in a passage (Mos. 283–349) that evokes not Virgil but Statius’ description of the villa of Manilius Vopiscus at Tibur. Statius, for instance, had spoken of how the villa of Vopiscus had mansions (‘praetoria’) on either side of the river Anio, which flowed between them with a gentleness surprising in a normally turbulent hill country stream, and of how the buildings were so close and the river so quiet that it was possible for those who lived there to hold a conversation from one bank to the other, and almost to stretch out and touch each other across the water (Silv. 1. 3. 24–31). It would have been absurd to say the same of villas perched high up on the cliffs either side of a much wider river such as the Moselle, but Statius’ phrasing, ‘mansions keep guard on either bank’ (Silv. 1. 3. 25), is unmistakeably echoed in Ausonius’ own words ‘mansions adorn either bank’ (Mos. 286). Nor is it only the mountain pleasure retreat of Tibur that the Moselle appears to rival. In the same book of poems Statius had complimented another rich friend, Claudius Etruscus, by declaring that the baths he had built and furnished with splendid coloured marbles were so luxurious and so charming that even a visitor who had recently come from Baiae, the Roman watering spot par excellence, with all its famous bath-houses, would not look down his nose at such an establishment (Silv. 1. 5. 60–1). Similarly, Ausonius’ description culminates in encomium of the private baths of some of the villas that stand on the river’s banks, far below the cliffs. Drawing their water from the Moselle, and using the heat of Vulcan’s fire along with the similarly miraculous power of Roman hydraulics, these northern baths reproduce in miniature the attractions of Baiae (Mos. 345–8): But if a stranger should come here from Cumaean shores, He would believe that Euboean Baiae had presented to this place A modest copy of itself: so great the elegance and the splendour That entice us, and yet its pleasures breed no base delight.

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That is, if someone came to this extremity of the empire from the famous resorts of the Bay of Naples, he would see here on the Moselle’s banks a small copy of the bath-houses he had left behind him at Baiae, but with one difference. Baiae was notorious for the corruptions of its luxury, its dangerous appeal summed up by an epigram of Martial (Epigrams 1. 62) that told of a lady who was a Penelope when she came to Baiae but a Helen when she left it. The more chaste pleasure-houses of the north, however, are true cultural ornaments to the landscape, not decadent dens of luxus and its attendant infamy. What was once the periphery of the Roman world now, in Ausonius’ celebration of the Moselle valley, provides the emperor with his capital, while the countryside around imperial Trier offers, in its natural endowments and the civilised refinements of its settled and harmonious landscape of river and villas, a beauty that matches the best the empire has to offer in technology and pleasure, and all without falling into moral decadence and decay. This was of course an age that we now see as presaging the end of Roman power. Ausonius is certainly aware of the military considerations that had induced Valentinian, memorably described by Peter Brown as ‘the last emperor who systematically patrolled and fortified the western frontiers’,3 to set up his court at Trier. As Ausonius knew, the city lay deep in the heart of the ancestral lands of the Belgae. Ausonius’ well-read audience, especially the GalloRomans among them, will have remembered that the Belgae were characterised by no less an adversary than Julius Caesar as the bravest of all the Gauls (De Bello Gallico (‘The Gallic War’) 1. 1. 3), and that they were said, moreover, to have been largely of German origin, having crossed the Rhine and driven out the earlier Gaulish inhabitants. Their ancestors, indeed, were the only people of Gaul who had had the power and the courage to prevent the Cimbri and the Teutones from entering their territory in the invasions of the late second century bc (De Bello Gallico (‘The Gallic War’) 2. 4. 1–3). They gave Caesar himself a run for his money when, after being initially overrun, they rose up against his legate Titus Labienus in 57 bc. More pertinently, it seems clear enough that Ausonius wanted his readers to recall the famous rebellion of the Batavi and the Treveri under the leadership of Julius Civilis in ad 69–70 and the establishment of a short-lived ‘Empire of the Gauls’, since at the very beginning of the poem (Aus., Mos. 1–4) he tells

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us how in his travels he had passed through the gloomy site of the battle of Bingen (Vingum), where Julius Tutor of the Treveri was defeated by Vespasian’s legate Sextilius Felix (Tac., Hist. 4. 70): I had crossed over swift Nava with its misted stream, Marvelling at the walls newly added to ancient Vingum, Where in times gone by Gaul matched the rout of the Latins at Cannae, And over the fields her companies lie helpless and unmourned. If the poem begins with a reference to a terrible battle in which Romans and Belgae had fought as enemies, it is framed at almost the other end with a reference to Trier as the ‘imperial city’ and by the claim that the river had witnessed ‘the joint triumphs of father and son’ when Valentinian and Gratian had defeated an invasion by the Alemanni in ad 368 (Mos. 420–4).4 In the three centuries that lay between those two battles, Ausonius is suggesting, the warlike Belgae had ceased to be the reluctant subjects of Rome, and their homelands had become as cultured, and as Roman, as Tibur and Baiae, a peaceful landscape of villas and vineyards guarded by the legions of Rome. It would not last. Italy itself was invaded in the first decade of the next century by the Visigoths, whose leader Alaric combined with his status as king the Roman military office of ‘Master of the Soldiery in Illyricum’. The confusion of his titles heralds the confusion of the age to come. The Emperor Honorius, holed up in the city of Ravenna where he was protected by the marshes and the sea, looked for deliverance to his chief general and father-inlaw Stilicho, and neither had much time or thought to spare for the villa-owners of the Moselle valley. In December ad 406 the Rhine frontier finally collapsed. The Suebi and the Vandals swept through the Frankish troops who manned the Roman defences. Within three years Jerome was bewailing to the Gallo-Roman lady Ageruchia the devastation of her homeland, with Mainz captured and destroyed, and such cities as Reims, Tournai and Strasbourg ‘transferred into Germany’ (Epistles 123. 16). Direct imperial rule in the north of Gaul had thus come to an end, but there were those who would strive manfully to perpetuate Roman ways a little longer in the south. Among them was Gaius Sollius Modestus Apollinaris Sidonius, whose career and writings

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are as remarkable as his name. Born a generation or so after the catastrophic invasion, he had close connections with the leading families of Lyon and Clermont. His social standing was further enhanced by marriage to Papianilla, the daughter of Avitus, one of the numerous short-lived emperors of the last years of the Western Empire, and his career in the Roman civilian administration reached its culmination in the rank of Prefect of the City under another of those emperors, Anthemius. That was the office that had been held four centuries before by Plotius Pegasus, who helped advise Domitian on what do to with the giant fish: Pegasus appears to have advanced no further, but Sidonius was destined to exchange his toga for a mitre, and to end his days as Bishop of Clermont, charged not just with the souls of the city’s inhabitants but with keeping their earthly bodies safe from the besieging Goths. Pliny the Younger had complained of being ‘worn down by a thousand labours’, but at least those labours did not include organising the resistance of Comum to an invading army. Even so, Sidonius found time in his complex career to emulate Pliny by publishing a voluminous correspondence in which, like his forerunner, he presented to the world the life and ideals of a Roman aristocrat of his day. Villas and literature are prominent in those letters, above all in the long epistle (Ep. 2. 2) encouraging the schoolmaster Domitius to give up the exhausting business of expounding the comedies of Terence in town during the summer ‘to pupils pale no less with the heat than with fear’ (Ep. 2. 2. 2). Domitius is invited instead to visit his friend at Avitacum, an estate dearer to him, says Sidonius, than the property he had inherited from his own father for the reason that, as the name also shows, it had come to him with his wife, Avitus’ daughter. A leisurely description lingers in particular over the well-lit, capacious baths, but emphasis is placed also on a portico overlooking the lake and on a number of dining rooms, one of which offers a similar view of the lake so that Domitius can sip his chilled drink at his leisure as he watches a fisherman busy with his catch. As an additional enticement, Sidonius tells Domitius he can fall asleep after dinner to the sound of a shepherd piping on the hills around, some local Tityrus in the flesh to surpass the fictional one in that first Eclogue of Virgil to which Ausonius had alluded in Mosella and which was undoubtedly also on the curriculum at Domitius’ school in town.

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The invitation to leave behind the hassles of the city and to rest in the tranquillity of the country, in a villa where nature and literature are in harmony, is by now very familiar to us. There are those who even find it all rather too familiar: Jill Harries suggests that Sidonius’ description relies on Pliny’s famous accounts of his own villas ‘to such an extent that the accuracy of the letter as a description of the real villa becomes seriously open to question.’5 More generally, Greg Woolf thinks that the appeal to ‘Plinian and Horatian ideals of rural residences built to permit the discerning to live in a civilized and urbane manner’ against the backdrop of a tranquil, tamed rural landscape should perhaps be seen as a manifestation of ‘a classicizing preoccupation’ with the literature of the Golden Age and therefore ‘might reasonably be interpreted as a response to threatened change, rather than as a reflection of continuity.’6 Change was certainly threatened and, however wide the gulf may have been between hallowed classicising ideal and muddy Gaulish reality, it was literature that allowed men like Sidonius and Domitius to narrow it. To teach the Eunuchus of Terence to heat-dazed schoolboys and to confer glory on the Avitacum by associating it with the Laurentine villa was in itself resistance to the tides of change, an assertion and enactment of a precious continuity. Roman arms have suffered shipwreck, Sidonius tells another correspondent, Johannes, but Roman literature has found safe harbour, and Johannes’ pupils owe to his teaching the preservation of some of the marks of their ancient birthright: ‘for now that the gradations of social status have been removed, by which the highest and the lowest were each distinguished from the other, the only badge of noble rank will henceforth be the knowledge of letters’ (Ep. 8. 2. 2). That was an exaggeration, of course. Even barbarian kings would need their courtiers and administrators, and they would draw some of them from the old nobility, while cities in the new Christian Europe would need their bishops. And yet with the end of imperial rule came the end of the imperial bureaucracy, along with its glittering careers and its fine gradations of honour. It was by his knowledge of Pliny and Horace that a Roman gentleman could now hope to be recognised for what he was, and his status could be asserted by a continuing allegiance to their ideals. A knowledge of the Silvae of Statius could also help with this adjustment to reality. The old world in which Ausonius had flourished and won rank and distinction had grown vulnerable and

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endangered, while the class that had been accustomed, under the authority of the emperor, to rule and protect that world now had only an unsure and intermittent grip on power. Statius’ flexibility and skill in praising his friends and their properties by reasserting the value of retreat and cultured self-improvement offered a model for conservative poets faced with radical social and political change. That Ausonius had known the Silvae of Statius we can infer from his allusive reworkings of phrases from the poems, but Sidonius takes care to leave us in no doubt of his debt. One of his longest and most elaborate poems is addressed to Pontius Leontius, a singularly rich and influential Aquitanian (Carm. 22). Sidonius declares in the letter framing the poem that, if any reader should think the composition too long, then by the very act of declaring so he would merely succeed in advertising to the world his ignorance of classical literature and his incompetence as a critic. After all, Sidonius continues, Statius, a poet of the highest reputation, had not used mere epigrams of two or four lines to honour his friends, but had extended with what Horace had called ‘purple patches’ (Ars Poetica (‘The Art of Poetry’) 15–16) the poems that he wrote in honour of such subjects as the baths of Etruscus, the temple rebuilt on his Surrentine estate for Hercules by Pollius Felix, and the villa of Vopiscus at Tibur. To those poems (Silv. 1. 5, 3. 1 and 1. 3) Sidonius ought to have added Statius’ praises of Pollius’ villa and its Epicurean delights (Silv. 2. 2), but learned readers with more sense than the ignorant critic here subjected to Sidonius’ disdain will hardly have needed so plain an indication of Sidonius’ principal model. His own poem describes at length the site and charms of Pontius Leontius’ country retreat in a riotous mixture of mythological fantasy and enthusiastic description that reveals the influence of Statius in both conception and a multitude of details. Bacchus and Apollo meet by chance, and the god of poetry persuades the god of wine to take up residence with him in Aquitaine at the confluence of the Garonne and the Dordogne, where, in a landscape of rich vineyards, Pontius will one day erect a house destined to preserve the best of Rome. The whole atmosphere is one of joy and cultured living, with praise showered not only on the house and its magnificent setting but also, in a manner reminiscent of Statius’ description of the happy marriage of Pollius Felix and Polla Argentaria, on the union of Pontius Leontius and his devoted wife. There is, however, one important

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difference. Pollius and Polla were in Epicurean retreat, and had renounced the dangers of politics. Sidonius, however, hints that the great man’s seclusion is temporary or that, at any rate, he retains some ambitions for success in the world outside, for, adjoining the heated rooms that make up the winter residential suite of the house there is a chamber where Pontius’ wife is imagined as weaving for him a splendid robe of silk and gold thread, for ‘never did any lady of the Pontian house take greater joy in her husband’s illustrious rank’ (Carm. 22. 195–6). The description evokes the consular and triumphal robes worn by the Emperor Honorius and the other high dignitaries of the imperial court who appear in the panegyrics of Claudian a generation before. What rank Pontius Leontius may have attained in the imperial bureaucracy is, however, obscure to us. That world was fading, and the poem in other ways cannot help but reveal the gap between old aspirations and current politics. Its very title proclaims the changes underfoot, for the country house of Pontius Leontius is not a villa at all, but a fortified manor house, a burgus, whose German name hints at the need for defence and at the power of the German kings who had taken the place in Gaul of the emperors of Rome. Instead of sprawling pavilions along the riverbanks, we hear of a hill crowned with walls and of lofty towers immune to attack by siege-engines and battering-rams (Carm. 22. 114–25). Similarly, while Sidonius’ most lavish descriptions are of the rivers and the vineyards around the burgus and of the baths whose coloured marbles recall those in the villas of Statius’ friends, he also makes space for amenities of a much more immediately practical nature, such as would have jarred in the description of the luxury enjoyed by a Pollius Felix at the height of Roman peace and prosperity (Carm. 22. 169–70): Above, as their buildings stretch far away, the granaries Grow, and with abundant grain they cramp the house. The granaries are mentioned, moreover, immediately after the description of a remarkable wall-painting that adorned the colonnade. Statius’ patrons would no doubt have preferred genteel paintings of rural landscapes and mythological scenes with which to beautify their holiday retreats at Surrentum and Tibur, but we learn that Pontius’ taste was for an obscure event in the war against

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King Mithradates of Pontus half a millennium before. His painting depicted the city of Cyzicus under siege and the courageous soldier who swam across a stretch of sea, holding safely above the waters the missive sent by the Roman general Lucullus to give the citizens new heart from the knowledge that he was hastening to their relief. With Goths and Burgundians vying with the retreating empire for control of the south of Gaul, the fear of siege and starvation was no merely antiquarian matter. In the very next poem in the collection, to his friend Consentius of Narbo (Narbonne), Sidonius speaks of the damage still visible in the city’s defences from the Gothic siege of ad 436, of their ‘half-ruined citadels’ and their ‘great stones shaken by the blows’ of siege-engines (Carm. 23. 51–68). Those illustrious scars, when the poem was written, could be characterised as ‘the glory of an old war’, but old wars in troubled times were all too easily followed by new ones, and Sidonius himself, as we have seen, would later spend five years of his life resisting a besieging Gothic army at Clermont. The desperate citizens whom Sidonius describes – with how much or how little dramatic exaggeration we cannot say with any certainty – as reduced to eating the moss from the cracks in their walls (Ep. 7. 7. 3) would have envied Pontius Leontius those splendid granaries. Like Statius, Sidonius knew how to find words of praise for any friend or patron and in any set of circumstances, and he knew how to present even the ravages of impassive Fortune as proof of virtue. The shattered walls of Narbonne, with no ivory decorations and no mosaics in their gates to rival the handsome defences of happier cities, are honoured in his pages as if they were a veteran’s medals, the evidence of their citizens’ courage and loyalty. It may even be that we can see him putting a brave face on things when he tells us about his own property. In describing the bath-house on his estate at Avitacum he proudly declares that the walls were plain white affairs of chastely polished concrete, disfigured by no paintings of naked figures such as adorned pagan bath-houses, of the kind that might illustrate a ‘shameful tale which, as it honours art, dishonours the artist’ (Ep. 2. 2. 6). All very creditable in a future bishop, no doubt, but Jill Harries may well be right to put the claim in the context of archaeological evidence for ‘the relative scarcity of well-maintained and fully occupied villa sites dating from the fifth century.’7 Might it not simply be that men like Sidonius could no longer afford to hire the necessary artists?

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To talk of decline, to talk of decay; to offend irascibly egalitarian sensibilities with harsh words like ‘barbarian’ or ‘massacre’, ‘destruction’ or ‘despoiling’; to suggest in a fit of recidivist nostalgia for the indefensible that something was lost when the power of Rome ebbed in the west; to commit the great and unforgivable offence of regretting empire; all this requires in our crabbed and sanctimonious age the self-confidence and indeed the courage of the Enlightenment or, better still, the Victorians. The transformation undergone by the societies of post-Roman western Europe, however, is not to be read only in debates about political and religious authority: it is visible in the dislocation of the Roman economy and in what that meant for those who could no longer enjoy reliable access to the comforts of a sophisticated and integrated market. Bryan Ward-Perkins laments the ‘end of complexity’, noting how the collapse of Roman imperial power in Britain and Spain was followed by the end of almost all the long-distance trade in that most ubiquitous and essential consumer product of antiquity, pottery: ‘only vessels shaped without the use of the wheel were available, without any functional or aesthetic refinement. In Britain, most pottery was not only very basic, but also lamentably friable and impractical.’8 Another casualty was the stout Roman ceramic roof tile, which steadily gave way to older materials like thatch that were far less reliably impervious to fire and rain.9 In a world where trade in such staples of economic life was starting to contract, it would be small wonder if accomplished painters were no longer so easily found to decorate the walls of villa bath-houses. Certainly, the urban and villa culture of southern Gaul was already coming under pressure, and Harries notes, for example, how Sidonius praises Elaphius for constructing a new baptistery at Rodez in Rouergue ‘at a time when hardly anyone else would have the heart to patch up the old ones’ (Ep. 4. 15. 1).10 A century or so later we find another poet, Venantius Fortunatus, praising the work of Bishop Leontius of Bordeaux in restoring villas in his native Aquitaine. Fortunatus describes the new bathhouse erected at Besson (Carm. 1. 18. 15–16), and speaks warmly of the harmony of nature and civilisation in language that allows us to admire the persistence of the classical ideals that make him a link in the chain extending all the way back to Cicero on his Tusculan estate. When he adds, however, that the bishop has brought back human beings to what had become a wasteland inhabited by wolves

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(Carm. 1. 18. 17–18), we can, even if we remember to allow for some poetic exaggeration, sense something of the widespread decay in that lovely land of well-tended vines whose praises Ausonius had sung in the days of his glory. We can, on the other hand, also see the continuing determination of the Gallo-Roman nobility to uphold tradition. This Leontius is almost certainly a kinsman of the Pontius Leontius who owned the burgus, and his wife Placidina was herself a descendant of Sidonius and his wife, Papianilla, who had brought him his beloved Avitacum. As Judith George observes, Fortunatus depicts him as ‘a proud, sophisticated Gallo-Roman of great wealth and power, who saw himself as a true descendant of his Roman forebears in his cultural values and life-style.’11 The short cycle of three poems honouring his villas within easy reach of his metropolitan see at Bordeaux (Carm. 1. 18–20) accordingly lays the emphasis on the baths and other fine buildings that are in accord with the tradition of the, by now, venerable villa-poem, and Fortunatus even uses, for example, the word ‘praetoria’ (Carm. 1. 18. 7) for the buildings at Besson, thereby linking them with both the mansions of Vopiscus at Tibur and the villas in the valley of the Moselle that had won the praises of Ausonius. Leontius, however, may already have been something of an anomaly in his conscious attempt to restore both the villa and the classical ideal it embodied. Others among the honorands of Fortunatus’ poems seem to have had less lofty, or at least more clearly pragmatic aims, as when Bishop Felix of Nantes is praised for the splendid feat by which he had a river damned and its course diverted so as to irrigate productive farmland (Carm. 3. 10). True, a poem in praise of Roman civil engineering can be said to continue the tradition of Statius’ Silvae, which had done honour to Pollius Felix’s conquest of nature in clearing the cliff-tops of Surrentum to provide the ground for his villa (Silv. 2. 2. 52–62) as well as to the construction of a fine new road by the Emperor Domitian (Silv. 4. 3). And the encomiast does his best, hinting without apparent irony that the heroic victory of Bishop Felix over the river surpasses that of Achilles over the Scamander in the Iliad of Homer (Carm. 3. 10. 2–6). By the middle of the sixth century, at any rate, when Fortunatus was writing in praise of Leontius and Felix, direct Roman imperial rule in Gaul was a distant memory. The Romanitas of Ausonius, Prefect of the City, and the Romanitas of Felix, Bishop of Nantes,

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could not be one and the same thing: there were no more emperors in Trier or Ravenna, the triumph of Christianity over pagan values was well on its way to completion, and to be Roman under German kings was to be a good Catholic. The passing of the classical world can be seen in the archaeological record, both in cities and in villas, as Tamara Lewit amply demonstrates.12 Urban amenities built for the entertainment of the people by magistrates belonging to an empire-wide élite, such as theatres, amphitheatres and public baths, were associated by the faithful with pagan dissolution. Some fell into disuse and were quarried for their building materials, while others were converted in ways that served commercial or agricultural production. Even if urban populations may have declined, building activity continued, but now rich patrons built churches and monasteries. Out in the country, the great villas were not, as was once thought, simply abandoned to squatters, but appear instead often to have been consciously adapted for utilitarian purposes, with their grand reception rooms turned into storehouses, and oil-presses and kilns set up in the peristyles and terraces where men like Sidonius and Domitius might once have aspired to discuss literature and philosophy as Cicero and Hortensius had done so many centuries before. And the dead began to invade the places once reserved for the living: as burials clustered around the shrines of the martyrs in cities, so graves were dug within the walls of villas which now included private baptisteries and oratories. For Lewit, as for many revisionist contemporary scholars, all this is not to be seen as the effect of necessity or reduced circumstances but rather as a matter of the preferences of a rural élite to whom ‘the imperial lifestyle and aesthetic [had become] irrelevant’, and she suggests that ‘perhaps land-owners continued to occupy the same sites, but chose to do so in a very different manner.’13 Perhaps, but Lewit herself notes the replacement of stone and brick and tile with more ephemeral materials such as wood and stucco;14 cheaper, no doubt, but also in keeping with the unwelcome disruption of the imperial economy discussed by Ward-Perkins. And what would Pontius Leontius, who could boast of both granaries and luxurious baths in his splendid burgus, have said if told of the grain silo that, in the middle of the sixth century, would one day usurp and disfigure the lordly bath-house of the great villa of Séviac?15 The poems of Fortunatus for Bishop Leontius show that at least some of the Gallo-Roman nobles of his time still aspired to live up

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to the old classicising ideals that Lewit sees as being consciously abandoned by his class. And if his kinsman Pontius Leontius would have approved of the baths he built at Besson, it does not follow that he would have been surprised to have a bishop in the family. After all, next to the room where his own wife supposedly wove his splendid magisterial robes there was another with a wall-painting depicting ‘the beginnings of the circumcised Jews’, presumably scenes from the Old Testament (Carm. 22. 200–1). Similarly, two of Sidonius’ other friends, Ferreolus and Apollinaris, had villas near Nemausus (Nîmes), each apparently equipped with a fine library of both Christian and pagan authors. The ladies’ seats were carefully placed near the works of devotion, with which they were no doubt piously content, but the benches intended for the gentlemen were convenient for the volumes of pagan authorities like Varro and Horace as well as for those of the Christian poet Prudentius. Cicero and his brother at Tusculum had discussed the nature of the laws with the aid of Plato: Sidonius and his friends argued radical theology with the aid of Turranius Rufinus’ Latin translation of the Adamantius, a work mistakenly attributed to Origen (Ep. 2. 9. 4–5). It is as easy to exaggerate the continuities as it is to overstate the changes, and the Horace who praised the quiet life of leisure, love and learning on his Sabine farm would no doubt have thought Turranius Rufinus an odd volume to find sitting on the shelves alongside his Odes. Yet Sidonius and his world were in important ways still much closer to that ancient ideal of Roman culture than, barely a century later, a man like Bishop Leontius could convincingly aspire to be. For Leontius the aristocratic ethic for service could most easily be satisfied through the holding of high office in the church, and the patronage of kings and high-ranking clerics was what made an earthly career. In Sidonius’ day, however, although the north of Gaul had passed under barbarian rule, the empire still claimed control of most of the south, and the path to careers in the imperial bureaucracy was not yet blocked. En route to Rome, perhaps in ad 455 as a companion to his father-in-law the Emperor Avitus, or possibly on a later journey there in ad 467, Sidonius took time out from his other business to write to a young Gallo-Roman nobleman whom he thought in need of a reminder of what it was that he owed the state, his ancestors, and himself (Ep. 1. 6). Could Eutropius, he wondered, really be so lacking in ambition, and in the

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proper sense of his own dignity, that he would be content to plough his fields and hoe his vineyard, and call that ‘the highest happiness that he could pray for’ (Ep. 1. 6. 3)? It is unlikely that the young sprig of a family Sidonius designates as senatorial in rank would have spent much time working in his own fields, but the fear that the upper classes would abandon their traditional responsibilities in preference for a quiet life seems real enough: what tempted a Vatia in the days of Tiberius might seem more tempting still in the troubled times of the fifth century, for all that the scorn of some latter-day Seneca might ensue. Sidonius attempts to scare the young man back on to the path of righteous piety towards his ancestors and the state by confronting him with the shame that would attach to him in old age if he found himself reduced to the status of ‘an inglorious peasant’ and obliged to stand in the background in the local city council while thrusting youngsters, perhaps even ones of shockingly humble birth, took precedence over him in debates by virtue of their magisterial rank (Ep. 1. 6. 4). Let yourself get entangled in the nets of Epicurean dogma, he adds, and ‘I swear by our ancestors and our descendants alike that I will wash my hands of you’ (Ep. 1. 6. 5). This very traditionalist admonition worked, or, at any rate, the upright Sidonius happily took the credit for the fruitful effect of his own advice when, some time later, he wrote to Eutropius again in order to congratulate the young man on his appointment as praetorian prefect, or governor, of Gaul in ad 470 (Ep. 3. 6). This second letter is an altogether much politer affair, addressing Eutropius with the deferential pronoun ‘vos’ and even calling him ‘lord’. Sidonius also expresses a thought with which we are familiar from Pliny the Younger’s musings on the career and well-deserved retirement of Spurinna, incidentally revealing that the young would-be philosopher cared not, in fact, for Epicurus but for the neo-Platonist doctrines of Plotinus (Ep. 3. 6. 2): Scarcely could you be induced by my exhortations to join to your study of philosophy the governorship of a province, since you were clinging to the dogmas of your co-sectarian Plotinus, and the wrestling-floor of the Platonists had whirled you off to the deep leisure of a quietism not suited to your age. So I added the lesson that the free profession of that school of learning would belong to the time when you had become quit of your debts to your family.

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Had Pliny been much given to severity and bombast, we might be able to imagine him reading the young men of Comum a similar lesson in social responsibility. In his time as governor of Bithynia, however, Pliny had conducted investigations into the illicit activity of local adherents to the subversive and secretive new cult of the Christians. He would have been frankly astonished to read the conclusion that Sidonius drew from Eutropius’ decision to follow his advice (Ep. 3. 6. 3): And so, as one should at the outset, we give abundant thanks to Christ, who, just as He until this time conferred glory on your high status through the noble rank of your ancestors, so now He raises it up with titles to match theirs. That Eutropius should seek worldly office in the tradition of his ancestors is, we learn, in keeping with the will of Christ. The Christians of Bithynia, in their turn, might have found that surprising. They would surely have remembered that, when a young man who ‘had great possessions’ had asked how he might win eternal life, the Christ of the Gospels had told him to sell all that he had and give it to the poor (Matthew 19: 16–22), and had said nothing about making his parents happy by taking up a career in provincial administration. Though you drive out nature with a pitchfork, Horace observed, she will always come running back (Ep. 1. 10. 24). Aspiration to high office in the service of the state could not be easily weeded out from the furrows that ran deep in the minds of men like Sidonius. The loyalty of the provincial aristocracy of whom he was such a prominent representative was useful to an emperor newly seated on a shaking throne, and so it was that Anthemius invited Sidonius to accept appointment as Prefect of the City of Rome, along with the rank of senator and patrician, in ad 468.16 Service and honour still came first, as they had for Pliny; retirement and honourable otium on one’s estates were to be earned, as they had been by Spurinna. Yet the demands of service and honour, in these strange times of upheaval and confusion, took insistent and untraditional forms. Within a year of returning to Gaul, the former Prefect of the City, perhaps to his own surprise, found himself consecrated Bishop of Clermont. His own retirement had been postponed yet again. Like Pliny

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before him, he had his thousand labours to wear him down. The defence of Clermont against King Euric of the Goths and, after surrender, exile to a fortress near Carcassonne, where sleep was made impossible by the quarrels of his neighbours, two old Gothic women with a fondness for strong drink and vituperation (Ep. 8. 3. 2); and even in better times the pastoral duty to care for prisoners in need of ransom and for the refugees of war, and to provide also for the penniless of Clermont whom God in His unfathomable wisdom loved more than He loved his bishops; they all left so little time for ease and quiet by the lake at Avitacum. Perhaps he could not hope to rest this side of Paradise. And even when retirement came, the bishop reflected, those living the life of cultured otium in their country houses should take a thought for what part of them it was that they wanted to endure. We find Sidonius writing to another of his close friends, Consentius of Narbonne, who lived at his ease, keeping open house at his suburban villa between the city, the river and the sea (Ep. 8. 4. 1). There the gracious Consentius wrote lyric and elegiac poetry, a living embodiment of the Horatian ideal in its imperial twilight. Whenever those poems came to him, says Sidonius, hot, as it were, from the craftsman’s anvil, he felt sure they would win yet more favour for their author among his contemporaries, and yet greater fame among posterity (Ep. 8. 4. 2). We think of Pliny and his advice to his enviable friend Caninius Rufus, out at his villa at Comum: write, he had told him, write and be remembered; fashion and hammer out something that will be yours for evermore. We can even hear upon the anvil (incude) of Consentius the echoing blows of Caninius Rufus’ hammer (excude, Plin. Ep. 1. 3. 4). Sidonius himself once wrote such poetry, he goes on to say, ‘but now it is time for serious reading and serious writing, and for thinking about the life eternal rather than our place in memory’ (Ep. 8. 4. 3). In any case it is not our writings, he adds, but our deeds that will be weighed, and so his fatherly advice to his old friend is that he turn his talent to the praise of heaven and his money to the maintenance of the church. The world had changed, and with it had changed the meaning of the ideal of otium. Perhaps Consentius was as ready to take Sidonius’ advice as Eutropius had been. His villa, like those of Cicero and Pliny, of Pollius

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Felix and Hadrian, was equipped, as Sidonius tells us, with all the luxuries that Roman wealth and genius could still, in those darkening days, provide: hot baths and porticoes, vineyards and libraries. All that, indeed, and more. There was also a chapel.

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Further Reading

Greek and Roman authors English translations of almost all of the authors mentioned in this book can be found in the parallel texts (Latin or Greek on the left-hand page, English on the right) that make up the Loeb Classical Library, published in Cambridge, MA and London by Harvard University Press. These vary considerably in the quality of the Greek or Latin text published and in the density of the notes provided, but even the oldest can usually still serve as good introductions to the authors and their historical contexts. Particularly useful are those of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus (in four volumes; D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 1999), the Silvae of Statius (D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 2003), the Epigrams of Martial (in three volumes; D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 1993), Juvenal (in combination with the poems of another satirist, Persius; Susanna Morton Braund, 2004), Pliny the Younger (in two volumes; Betty Radice, 1969), Ausonius (in two volumes; Hugh G. Evelyn White, 1919–21), and Sidonius Apollinaris (in two volumes; W. B. Anderson, 1936 and 1965). For a sensitive verse translation of what is probably the most important single text in the canon of Roman poetry describing villas, see also Betty Rose Nagle, The Silvae of Statius. Translated with Notes and Introduction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004). Suetonius’ richly detailed, ever-fascinating and scandal-filled biographies of the first dozen Roman emperors are expertly translated and judiciously annotated by Catharine Edwards in the Oxford World’s Classics series: Catharine Edwards (trans.), Suetonius. Lives of the Caesars (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Also to be recommended from the same series is the translation of Tacitus’ black and bitter history of the corrupt dynasty of the Caesars: J. C. Yardley (trans.), Tacitus.

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The Annals. The Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). There is no readily available translation into English of the whole of Venantius Fortunatus’ corpus of poems, but a fascinating selection has been thoughtfully and effectively translated and equipped with notes and short essays by Joseph Pucci as Poems to Friends: Venantius Fortunatus; Translated, with Introduction and Commentary (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010).

Villas Two general studies that remain useful, and indeed fundamental, to scholarship on Roman villas are Alexander G. McKay, Houses, Villas, and Palaces in the Roman World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975) and John Percival, The Roman Villa: an Historical Introduction (London: Batsford, 1976). There is also much of value in not only the text but also the copious plans, drawings and photographs to be found in J. B. Ward-Perkins, Roman Imperial Architecture (Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1981), especially Chapter 8 ‘Domestic Architecture in Town and Country’, pages 185–212. The current trends in scholarship that seeks to interpret the meaning and function of villas in Roman society can be seen in the collection of essays found in Jeffrey A. Becker and Nicola Terrenato (eds), Roman Republican Villas: Architecture, Context, and Ideology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). Art historians, social historians and literary critics naturally look at the archaeological and written sources for Roman villas in differing ways. For three stimulating articles illustrating this variety of approach see: Bettina Bergman, ‘Painted Perspectives of a Villa Visit: Landscape as Status and Metaphor’, in Elaine K. Gazda (ed.), Roman Art in the Private Sphere: New Perspectives on the Architecture and Décor of the Domus, Villa, and Insula (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 49–70; Nicholas Purcell, ‘The Roman Garden as a Domestic Building’, in Ian M. Barton (ed.), Roman Domestic Buildings, Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996), 121–51; and K. Sara Myers, ‘Docta otia: Garden Ownership and Configurations of Leisure in Statius and Pliny the Younger’, Arethusa 38 (2005), 103–29.

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1. Cicero and the Generals: Living the Life of Laertes The stirring tale of the fall of the Roman Republic, and of the establishment of the imperial monarchy, can be told as tragedy, as a series of disastrous clashes between a succession of obnoxious megalomaniacs, or as a history of successful Realpolitik and brilliant opportunism. Elements of all three enrich Sir Ronald Syme’s magnificent The Roman Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), still unsurpassed for its mastery of the source material and its trenchant style. If there is too much of Mussolini in Syme’s Caesar for modern tastes, much of value can be found in P. A. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic and Related Essays (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). If ever any period cried out to have its history written as biography, it is the age that produced in Cicero, Pompey, Crassus, Catiline, Caesar, Cato, Mark Antony, Octavian and Cleopatra the kind of line-up that not even Shakespeare could carry off in a single drama. Recent accounts to be recommended are Anthony Everitt, Cicero: the Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (New York: Random House, 2003) and Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). For something dryer and more sober, but not one whit the less fascinating, try Stefan Weinstock, Divus Julius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). Paul Zanker’s The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (trans. Alan Shapiro) (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1988) is a magisterial book that fully deserves its place on the reading list of anyone who is serious about attempting to understand either Roman art or Augustus. That he happens to be cited in Chapter One of this book only to be disagreed with is merely evidence of how discussion can be stimulated by good arguments amply documented and powerfully presented. Lastly, Marcello Gigante’s Philodemus in Italy: the Books from Herculaneum (trans. Dirk Obbink) (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995) is a wonderfully readable study that brings together history, archaeology and philosophy in such a way as to suggest something of the richness of the fusion of Greek and Roman cultures at a formative period in European history.

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2. Martial, Statius and the Epicureans: Marvellous is the Quietness of the Sea The scholar, philosopher and statesman Seneca the Younger was fabulously rich, never needed to teach large classes, grade termpapers, or answer to deans, and was actually listened to by those with real power. It is only to be expected that professional scholars should occasionally turn into green-eyed monsters when discussing him. Then again, some thoughts console us: who, for a start, could envy him the pupil with whose name his own is forever entwined? Commendably measured accounts by those who succeed in remaining open-minded about both his intellectual and political activity include Miriam T. Griffin, Seneca: a Philosopher in Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) and Brad Inwood, Seneca: Selected Philosophical Letters: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary (Oxford and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2007). For a good modern assessment of the character and reign of his murderous student consult Edward Champlin, Nero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). An excellent and wide-ranging collection of papers on various aspects of Nero’s reign can be found in Jaś Elsner and Jamie Masters (eds), Reflections of Nero: Culture, History, and Representation (London and Chapel Hill: Duckworth and The University of North Carolina Press, 1994). Those who want to know more about the Pisonian Conspiracy and are rightly suspicious of the damning eloquence of Tacitus will benefit from Victoria Emma Pagán, Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). The suicides of both Seneca and Nero, as narrated by Tacitus and Suetonius, bear the marks of a culture deeply concerned with the performance, or ‘textualisation’, of death and highly self-conscious with regard to the matter of securing literary immortality. These aspects of Neronian literature are discussed with stimulating insight by Catherine Connors in ‘Famous Last Words: Authorship and Death in the Satyricon and Neronian Rome’, her contribution (pp. 225–35) to Elsner and Masters’s Reflections of Nero. The Romans’ cultural preoccupation with death, and in particular with the question of how to make a noble and edifiying exit from the stage, is explored by Catharine Edwards in Death in Ancient Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), while

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James Ker, in The Deaths of Seneca (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), explores the many and varied ways in which ‘from the first century to the present’ the end of the philosopher’s life ‘has been retold through all manner of representations’ (p. 3). The identification of Polla Argentaria, the wife of Statius’ rich patron Pollius Felix, with the Polla who was the widow of Piso’s co-conspirator Lucan had been made before, but never with such clarity and persuasiveness as by R. G. M. Nisbet in ‘Felicitas at Surrentum (Statius, Silvae 2. 2)’, Journal of Roman Studies 68 (1978), 1–11 (= S. J. Harrison (ed.), R. G. M. Nisbet: Collected Papers on Latin Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 29–46). For Statius’ life and career, and for his relations in particular with the Emperor Domitian, there is no better starting-place than K. M. Coleman, Statius: Silvae IV: Edited with an English Translation and Commentary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). For Statius’ poems on the Surrentine villa of Pollius Felix and on the career and death of Lucan there is a finely judged new commentary by Carole E. Newlands: Statius: Silvae Book II (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 120–57 and 224–54. The commentary gives more context to the stimulating arguments, not least concerning Statius’ re-evaluation of wealth and his rewriting of the Horatian tradition, that had previously appeared in Carole E. Newlands, Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

3. Pliny and the Best of Princes: Worn Down by a Thousand Labours Pliny the Younger’s Letters are such an important source for the society and government of the Roman Empire at its height that almost any general history of Rome or handbook on Roman culture and the realities of life in his day will name him and quote or paraphrase at least one or two of the most famous pieces in the collection. Until recently, however, few scholars seem to have felt warmly enough towards Pliny to want to give up years of precious research time to appreciating or understanding him as an author in his own right. The most useful general study in English to get started

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with, therefore, probably remains A. N. Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). Sherwin-White is a little old-fashioned for modern tastes, perhaps, but at least he understands that, if you want to secure a clear view of the wider landscape, it is usually best not to set about it by looking down your nose. There are, however, encouraging signs that Pliny’s literary purposes and virtues are better appreciated now than they were for most of the last century. For instance, Andrew M. Riggsby, in ‘Pliny on Cicero and Oratory: Self-Fashioning in the Public Eye’, American Journal of Philology 116 (1995), 125–35, and Matthew Roller, in ‘Pliny’s Catullus: the Politics of Literary Appropriation’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 128 (1998), 265–304, have amply demonstrated Pliny’s intelligent and self-conscious engagement with two of his great predecessors from the Late Republic. Similar advances in our understanding of his work have been made in two notable recent book-length contributions: Ilaria Marchesi, The Art of Pliny’s Letters: A Poetics of Allusion in the Private Correspondence (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and Roy K. Gibson and Ruth Morello, Reading the Letters of Pliny the Younger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). For what life was like both for those who had to deal with emperors and for those who had to deal with being emperor see Fergus Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World: 31 bc – ad 337 (London: Duckworth, 1977). The remarkable trick of holding emperor and Senate in balance – along with the even more remarkable strategies employed by Roman rhetoricians for pretending that the balance was perfect – is amply discussed by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill in ‘Civilis Princeps: Between Citizen and King’, Journal of Roman Studies 72 (1982), 32–48, and J. E. Lendon, Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Much of what was involved is communicated with superb economy by Christopher Kelly in The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 23–60. A less sympathetic view than mine of rich Romans writing in luxurious villas and about luxurious villas can be found in John Henderson, Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters: Places to Dwell (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Lastly, although slaves play a very marginal part in the letters of Pliny, they are

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prominent in other genres of Latin literature, above all comedy and the novel. See further William Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

4. Juvenal and the Tyrant: Power Equal to the Gods Jaś Elsner fruitfully discusses Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli in the context of ‘Art and the Past: Antiquarian Eclecticism’, which is the title of the seventh chapter (pp. 169–97) of his Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: the Art of the Roman Empire ad 100–450 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Information on the extensive ruins and the site museum can be found in Filippo Coarelli, Rome and Environs: An Archaeological Guide (trans. James J. Clauss and Daniel P. Harmon) (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2007), 481–9. The architecture, landscape and literary and political significance of Nero’s Golden House are the subject of ‘Constructing Decadence: The Representation of Nero as Imperial Builder’, Elsner’s own contribution (pp. 112–27) to Jaś Elsner and Jamie Masters (eds), Reflections of Nero: Culture, History, and Representation (London and Chapel Hill: Duckworth and The University of North Carolina Press, 1994). For the literary sources on Domitian’s Villa Albana see Brian W. Jones, Suetonius: Domitian: Edited with an Introduction, Commentary, and Bibliography (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996), 45. The archaeological remains are described by Coarelli in Rome and Environs, 501–3. Domitian’s villa is of course best understood against the background of the emperor’s large-scale rebuilding of Rome itself. Domitian continued and enhanced the building programme of his father Vespasian and brother Titus, helping transform the centre of the city into a vast concatenation of public spaces – the Colosseum, the Temple of Peace, the Forum Transitorium, the Baths of Titus – that ostentatiously gave back to the people of Rome what Nero the ‘tyrant’ had confiscated for his private pleasures, while also spelling out the Flavian dynasty’s own agenda of peace at home and successful war abroad. The most comprehensive study of the subject is Robin Haydon DarwallSmith, Emperors and Architecture: A Study of Flavian Rome

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(Brussels: Latomus, 1996). The careers of both Statius and his father as professional poets who competed at the Augustalia and other festivals are amply discussed in Alex Hardie, Statius and the Silvae: Poets, Patrons and Epideixis in the Graeco-Roman World (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1983). The great bulk of scholarly work on the fourth Satire of Juvenal concentrates on one aspect or another of that complex poem, and in particular on its apparent disunity, rather than on offering a comprehensive analysis, so readers will probably most easily find their feet with a good commentary, such as Susanna Morton Braund, Juvenal: Satires Book I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 236–75.

5. Romans, Gauls and Christians: Mine is No Barbarous Land The complex transformation by means of which long-haired trouser-wearing Celtic-speaking ‘barbarians’ came to rank among the stoutest defenders of the ideals of Rome in the western half of Europe is richly discussed in Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). As any inhabit of the Hexagon can tell you, the greatest legacy that Rome has left to Europe is France, with her language, her literature and her universalising concept of human rights and law. All the same, the Clodius who taunted Cicero for being an immigrant in Rome would have been surprised to see Bordeaux produce a professor of rhetoric, let alone one who would end up as consul. For the career of Ausonius see Hagith Sivan, Ausonius of Bordeaux: Genesis of a Gallic Aristocracy (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), and for his varied and learned poetry see R. P. H. Green, The Works of Ausonius: Edited with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). The world that made an Ausonius possible, and the religious, cultural and political changes he lived through, are the subject of Peter Brown’s brilliant The World of Late Antiquity, ad 150–750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971). What that world was like for the richest and most powerful is amply documented and discussed in John Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, ad 364–425 (Oxford:

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Oxford University Press, 1975). Matthews’ work is in part complemented and extended by Ralph W. Mathisen, Roman Aristocrats in Barbarian Gaul: Strategies for Survival in an Age of Transition (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). The collapse of Roman power in the west in the fifth century is now often interpreted by historians and archaeologists in such a way as to lay emphasis on continuity rather than disruption, and on choice and variety rather than deprivation and fragmentation. For a good example of how this approach works out when it is applied to Roman villas as they appear in the archaeological record see Tamara Lewit, ‘ “Vanishing villas”: What Happened to Élite Rural Habitation in the West in the 5th–6th c?’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 16 (2003), 260–74. This sunny view of things is rarely taken by those who have some interest in history but not enough to sign up for a programme of research leading to a doctorate, and there are, to put it mildly, some difficulties in squaring it with the evidence. In The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) Bryan Ward-Perkins offers a lucid and admirably vigorous re-statement of the traditional view that firmly puts the darkness back into the Dark Ages. Not that his book is by any means unrelentingly grim: see page 204 note 16 for what may well be the funniest endnote or footnote in contemporary scholarship. The life and career of Sidonius Apollinaris can be studied in detail in Jill Harries, Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome ad 407–485 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). There is as yet no truly comprehensive and definitive study of his literary work in English. The reputation of Venantius Fortunatus, on the other hand, is currently enjoying something of a renaissance. His life and career are ably examined by Judith W. George in Venantius Fortunatus: a Poet in Merovingian Gaul (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), with much useful comment on his poetry along the way. More literary in their focus are Michael Roberts, The Humblest Sparrow: the Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009) and Joseph Pucci, Poems to Friends: Venantius Fortunatus; Translated, with Introduction and Commentary (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010).

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Notes

1. Cicero and the Generals: Living the Life of Laertes 1

Roland Mayer, Horace: Epistles, Book 1 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 137 (note on Ep. 1. 5. 3): ‘Moreover, since the guest of honour could hardly be expected to travel for several hours after his day’s work, the meal will be given in H[orace]’s town house (domi).’

2

R. G. M. Nisbet and Niall Rudd, A Commentary on Horace, Odes, Book III (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 354 (note on Carm. 3. 29. 25–6).

3

Nisbet and Rudd, op. cit., note 2, 345.

4

Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Translated by Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1988), 25.

5

Ibid., note 4, 25.

6

Ibid., 26.

7

Ibid., 25.

8 Ibid. 9

Ibid., note 4, 26.

10 Ibid., 31. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 The battle is conventionally known in English as ‘Pharsalus’, from the name of the city in the northern Greek region of Thessaly, near which it took place in August 48 bc. Strictly speaking we ought no doubt to say ‘Pharsalia’, as, for example, Ovid (Metamorphoses 15. 823) and Tacitus (Hist. 1. 50) do.

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14 I quote here from the translation of D. R. Shackleton Bailey, Cicero: Letters to Atticus. Volume IV (Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1999), 137. Note, however, that although ‘in the open’ conveys part of the sense of the Latin ‘in agro’ (the open air as opposed to the house itself) it also obscures another part, namely that the soldiers make their camp literally ‘in the field’ or ‘on the estate’, that is, right in Cicero’s backyard. 15 Shackleton Bailey, op. cit., note 14, 136, note 3.

2. Martial, Statius and the Epicureans: Marvellous is the Quietness of the Sea 1

Suetonius uses the word ‘quadripes’ (‘on all fours’, Nero 48. 4), which for the moment turns the fallen emperor into a four-legged animal. The depth of his degradation is neatly marked by the contrast drawn with his triumphant declaration on entering the Golden House for the first time, that he could finally ‘live like a human being’ (‘quasi hominem’, Nero 31. 2).

2

For contemporary literary accounts of the palace built for Domitian by Rabirius, generally known today as the Domus Flavia, see K. M. Coleman, Statius: Silvae IV: Edited with an English Translation and Commentary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 88–9 (note on Stat. Silv. 4. 2. 18) and Brian W. Jones, Suetonius: Domitian: Edited with an Introduction, Commentary, and Bibliography (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996), 49.

3

This particular ode of Horace is a famous one indeed, but even so I had missed the allusion until it was pointed out to me by Professor A. J. Woodman.

4

Delphina Fabbrini, Il migliore dei mondi possibili: gli epigrammi ecfrastici di Marziale per amici e protettori (Florence: Università degli Studi di Firenze. Studi e Testi 26, 2007), 8–9.

5

Horace’s remarkable, and remarkably enjoyable, poem can now be read with the aid of a lively and insightful new commentary by Emily Gowers: Horace: Satires Book I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 182–214.

6

Carole E. Newlands, Statius: Silvae Book II (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 121.

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109

7

R. G. M. Nisbet, ‘Felicitas at Surrentum (Statius, Silvae 2. 2)’, Journal of Roman Studies 68 (1978) 2 = S. J. Harrison (ed.), R. G. M. Nisbet: Collected Papers on Latin Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 31.

8

Carole E. Newlands, Statius’ Silvae and the Poetics of Empire (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 154–98.

9

Nicholas Purcell, ‘The Roman Garden as a Domestic Building’, in Ian M. Barton (ed.), Roman Domestic Buildings (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1996), 132.

10 Newlands, op cit. note 8, 191–7. 11 Ibid., note 6, 143 (note on Stat., Silv. 2. 2. 85–94). 12 Ibid. (note on Stat., Silv. 2. 2. 86, comparing Silv. 4. 2. 27). 13 See further Kathleen M. Coleman, M. Valerii Martialis: Liber Spectaculorum: Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 21. 14 R. G. M. Nisbet, ‘Felicitas at Surrentum (Statius, Silvae 2. 2)’, Journal of Roman Studies 68 (1978) 1–11 = S. J. Harrison (ed.), R. G. M. Nisbet: Collected Papers on Latin Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 29–46.

3. Pliny and the Best of Princes: Worn Down by a Thousand Labours 1

A life spent in cultured retirement could even redeem a political career blotted by scandal. Pliny the Younger offers a substantial obituary notice (Ep. 3. 7) on Silius Italicus, whose Punica, an epic poem in hexameter verse on the Second Punic War and Hannibal’s invasion of Italy, is the longest Latin poem to have survived from classical antiquity. Silius was the last of Nero’s nominees to hold a consulship and was thought to have damaged his reputation by his eager collaboration with the discredited régime. In his later years he took up more or less permanent residence in Campania, where he gave his time to writing and to his art collection, to the indulgence of a mania for buying more and more new villas, and to his reverence for Virgil, whose tomb in the area ‘he used to visit as if it were a temple’ (Ep. 3. 7. 8). Pliny suggests that Silius found

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compensation for his loss of political influence in esteem for his literary judgement: ‘He was among the most distinguished men in the state, holding no power but also inspiring no ill-will: he was acknowledged and cultivated, and often, lying on a little couch in a bedroom that was always crowded with visitors who were not there by chance, he would spend his days in the most cultured conversation when his writing allowed him the leisure’ (Ep. 3. 7. 4). The Latin phrase ‘ex fortuna’ is taken by Betty Radice to refer to Silius’ high social status as an enormously wealthy man who had held the consulship, and she therefore translates as follows: ‘in a room thronged with callers who had come with no thought of his rank’ (Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus. Volume I (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1969), 183). I take non ex fortuna as reinforcing and explaining the preceding word semper (‘always’): there was an endless stream of visitors who wanted to discuss literature with Silius, and who were willing to make a special trip in order to do so. 2

Carole E. Newlands, Statius: Silvae Book II (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 133 (note on Stat., Silv. 2. 2. 47).

3

D. A. Russell, An Anthology of Latin Prose (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 177.

4

John Henderson, Morals and Villas in Seneca’s Letters: Places to Dwell (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 86.

5

Ibid., note 4, 86.

6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid.

4. Juvenal and the Tyrant: Power Equal to the Gods 1

Jaś Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: the Art of the Roman Empire ad 100–450 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 175.

2

Elsner, op. cit., note 1, 175.

3

Jaś Elsner, ‘Constructing Decadence: The Representation of Nero as

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111

Imperial Builder’, in Jaś Elsner and Jamie Masters (eds), Reflections of Nero: Culture, History, and Representation (London and Chapel Hill: Duckworth and The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 122. 4

Nearly all of the ancient authors whose work survives (e.g. Suet., Nero 38 and Plin. Nat. Hist., 17. 1. 5) subscribe to the belief that Nero was responsible for the Great Fire of Rome. The exception is Tacitus, who leaves the question open (‘disaster followed, whether by chance or through deceit on the part of the emperor is uncertain’, Ann. 15. 38) and attests to the existence in his day of authorities supporting either explanation. Most modern historians work on the assumption that Nero is extremely unlikely to have willingly incurred the serious political risk that would have resulted from setting fire to his own capital city. Edward Champlin, however, has argued in Nero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, 178–209) that the emperor was indeed an arsonist intent on creating a spacious new city built on rational lines. Champlin points to evidence that strongly suggests that Nero, well in advance of the fire, deliberately set himself up as a latter-day version of the great popular champion Camillus, who had rebuilt Rome after the sack of the city by the Gauls in 390 bc. He also argues against the common belief, largely derived from authors of the Flavian age who were no doubt responding to the new dynasty’s propaganda, that the Golden House was designed to serve as the private retreat of the emperor. Instead, he imagines it as being intended, with its gardens and artificial lake, to function as a match for the public pleasure complex the emperor had already built on the Campus Martius with splendid new baths fed by the Stagnum Agrippae (‘the Pool of Agrippa’). In this view, the Flavians perverted Nero’s own rhetoric: ‘Yes, he treated the whole city as his house, as we know; yes, he even sought to make the city into his house: but his intention thereby was not to exclude the people, as his critics claimed. It was to include them’ (p. 208).

5

Filippo Coarelli, Rome and Environs: an Archaeological Guide. Translated by James J. Clauss and Daniel P. Harmon (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2007), 502.

6

K. M. Coleman, Statius: Silvae IV: Edited with an English Translation and Commentary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xvii and 101 (note on Silv. 4. 2. 66–7).

7

To the best of my knowledge the inscriptions have not yet been published in full. For a great deal of truly fascinating information, however, as well as for detailed comment on their archaeological context and historical significance, see Elena Miranda De Martino,

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112 Notes

‘Neapolis e gli imperatori. Nuovi dati dai cataloghi dei Sebastà’, Oebalus: Studi sulla Campania nell’antichità 2 (2007), 203–15, and Elena Miranda, ‘Consoli e altri elementi di datazione nei cataloghi agonistici di Neapolis’, in Marina Silvestrini (ed.), Le tribù romane: Atti della XVIe Rencontre sur l’épigraphie (Bari 8–10 ottobre 2009) (Bari: Edipuglia, 2010), 417–22. The excavations, in Piazza Nicola Amore, uncovered a temple with marble columns that stood on a podium just outside the ancient city walls. The inscriptions were incised on the marble panels covering the inner side of the wall of a portico attached to a building situated a little to the south of the temple. Since the inscriptions list the names of victors at the Augustalia, it seems clear that the temple was probably the ‘Caesareum’, dedicated to the imperial cult, while Miranda argues very plausibly that the building with the portico was a gymnasium (Oebalus 2 (2007), 204–5). The names of some 170 individual victors are preserved, while the inscriptions attest to the particular interest taken in the games by two of Domitian’s predecessors, Claudius and Titus. For alerting me to this important discovery, and for kindly providing me with the bibliographical information given above, I am deeply in the debt of my friends Valéry Berlincourt and Manuela Wullschleger. 8

That the elder Statius instructed the future Emperor Domitian in Roman religious history and customs is to be inferred from Stat., Silv. 5. 3. 178–80. For this passage, and for Domitian’s interest in religious matters, see Alex Hardie, Statius and the Silvae: Poets, Patrons and Epideixis in the Graeco-Roman World (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1983), 10–11.

9

Brian W. Jones, Suetonius: Domitian: Edited with an Introduction, Commentary and Bibliography (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996), 45 (note on Suet., Dom. 4. 4. in Albano).

5. Romans, Gauls and Christians: Mine is No Barbarous Land 1

Tacitus’ bleak dismissal of Roman ‘civilisation’ in Britain as a feature of the indigenous people’s ‘enslavement’ finds echoes in the works of some contemporary historians of Roman Britain, who object to what they see as the lingering and pernicious effects of a Victorian and post-Victorian orthodoxy that was too ready to honour empire as an instrument of progress and humane

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113

development. The case against the Romans is made with trenchant clarity by David Mattingly in An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2006), a book which lays out starkly ‘the hard facts of Roman conquest and domination’, of ‘defeat, subjugation and exploitation’ (p. 4), and thereby places ‘considerably more emphasis than usual … on the negative aspects of imperial rule and their impact on the subject peoples’ (p. 12). Mattingly’s book can be productively read with, and against, Guy de la Bédoyère, Roman Britain: A New History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), which argues that ‘life is rarely quite so simple’ and that ‘a new approach to the late Iron Age has made a very good case for the idea that some tribal aristocracies welcomed, and even coveted, Roman influence’ (Preface, p. 7). It is also worth remembering that views of the Roman empire were by no means uniform among the British even when their own empire was at its height: see Christopher Kelly, The Roman Empire: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 114–22. 2

Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: the Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 153.

3

Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, ad 150–750 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), 119, note to illustration 84.

4

Ausonius speaks in elevated but rather vague terms of the ‘enemy driven out beyond the Nicer and Lupodunum’ (Mos. 423), that is, the river Neckar and the town of Ladenburg, a little to the north-west of Heidelberg. The precise site of the battle is unknown, though Ammianus Marcellinus (27. 10. 8) gives its name as Solicinium. See further R. P. H. Green, The Works of Ausonius: Edited with Introduction and Commentary (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 507–8.

5

Jill Harries, Sidonius Apollinaris and the Fall of Rome ad 407–485 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 10.

6

Woolf, op. cit., note 2, 164.

7

Harries, op. cit., note 5, 132.

8

Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 104.

9

Ward-Perkins, op. cit., note 8, 94–6 with 204, note 16.

10 Harries, op. cit., note 5, 132. 11 Judith W. George, Venantius Fortunatus: a Poet in Merovingian Gaul (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 108.

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12 Tamara Lewit, ‘“Vanishing villas”: What Happened to Élite Rural Habitation in the West in the 5th–6th c?’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 16 (2003), 260–74. 13 Tamara Lewit, art. cit. note 11, 271. 14 Ibid., 262. 15 Ibid., note 5. 16 Harries, op. cit., note 5, 147.

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Index

Academy see Tusculum, villa of Cicero at Acerronia 8 Achilles 78, 99 Acilia 47, 48 Acindynus, Septimius 10 Actian Games 46 Actium 46 Aeneas 79 Aelius Spartianus 71 Africa 1, 9 Ageruchia 92 Agrippina the Younger 6, 7–9 Agricola, Julius 86, 87 Agrippa, Marcus Vispanius 76 Alaric 92 Alba, villa of Pompey at 1–2, 4, 76 Alba, villa of Domitian at 5–6, 35, 76–7, 79, 80, 85 Alba Longa 79 Alban Games 77, 83 Albius 5 Alemanni 92 Ambrose 9 Annaeus Mela 48 Antinous 73–4 Anicetus 8 Anthemius 93 Antium (Anzio) 6, 15 Antonia 7, 70 Antony, Mark 7, 17, 23, 24, 46, 70 Apollinaris 101

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Apollo 95 Apuleius 60 Aquitaine 95, 98 Aristogeiton 73 Arpinum, villa of Cicero at 18 art, works of in villas 10–11, 12, 13, 15–6, 45, 72, 87, 96–7, 101 Ascanius 79 Asinius Gallus 52 Athens 15, 16, 20, 32, 41, 74 Atticus 15, 18, 21, 61 Augustalia 46, 70, 78–9, 83 Augustus (Octavian) 3, 7, 17, 23, 27, 52, 54, 62–3, 69–70, 72, 84 Ausonius 88–92, 95, 99 Avitacum, villa of Sidonius 93, 99, 104 Avitus 93, 101 Bacchus 74, 95 Baiae 6, 7, 28, 90–1, 92 baptisteries 98, 100 Batavi 91 bath-houses 31, 87, 90–1, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 105 Bauli, villa of Hortensius, Antonia, Agrippina and Symmachus 6–12, 53 Belgae 91–2 Besson, villa of Bishop Leontius at 98, 101 Bingen, Battle of 92

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Bithynia 57, 65, 66–7, 103 boatmen, drunk and noisy 37–8 Bordeaux 88, 89, 98, 99 Britain 86, 98 Bruttedius Niger 24 Brutus 21 burgus of Pontius Leontius 95–7, 100 Burrus 8 Caesar, Julius 2, 16–7, 19, 20, 21, 22–3, 24, 70, 91 Caligula, Gaius 6, 7, 54 Callimachus 11 Calliope 49 Calpurnius Fabatus 63 Canopus 73–4 Capitoline Games 77 Capri 52 Caracalla 54–5 Carcassonne 104 Cato the Elder (‘Cato the Censor’) 10, 18 Cato the Younger 20 Ceres 79 chapel 105 Chiragan 87 Christ 1,103 Christianity 9, 66, 94, 100, 103 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (senior) 2, 7, 9, 10, 14–25, 28, 32, 74, 98, 100, 101, 104 Cicero, Marcus Tullius (junior) 20 Cicero, Quintus Tullius 17, 24, 101 Cincius, Lucius 15, 21 civilitas 55 Civilis, Julius 91 Claudia 88 Claudian 18, 96 Claudius 7, 70 Claudius Etruscus 90, 95 Cleopatra 46

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Clermont 93, 97, 103, 104 Clodius 2, 18, 19 Clodius Pollio 70 Columella 59 Comum 58, 63, 64, 93, 103, 104 Consentius of Narbo (Narbonne) 97, 104–5 consulship 10, 55, 89 Cornelius Fuscus 85–6 Crassus 17 Crispinus 80 Cumae 15, 51 Cupid 60 Curius Dentatus 19 Dacia, Domitian’s campaign in 77, 83, 85 Decebalus 85 Diogenes 21 Disraeli 69 Dolabella 23 Domitian 5, 35–6, 55, 76–84, 85, 93, 99 Domitius 93, 100 Domus Aurea see Golden House economy, collapse of the Roman 98–100 Egypt 73 Elaphius 98 Ennius 14 Epaphroditus 33, 35 Epicureanism 4, 5, 14, 38–9, 40–9, 51, 53, 102 Epicurus 41, 42, 53 Euric 104 Eutropius 101–3, 104 fatherland see patria Favorinus 71 Felix, Bishop of Nantes 99 Ferreolus 101 fish ponds 7

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Index

Fitzwilliam Museum 74 Flaminian Way 37 Forum Iulii (Fréjus) 87 Franks 87, 92 Fulvia 70 Fuscus Salinator 65 Gallo-Romans 87, 91, 92, 99, 100–1 Gaul 86–105 Germanicus 27, 70 Golden Age 64 Golden House 34, 44, 45, 74–5, 76, 83 Goths 87, 97, 104 see also Visigoths granaries 96–7, 100 granite, red Egyptian 45 Gratian 9, 89, 92 Greek language and culture 11, 12–14, 18, 21–2, 32, 38, 43, 78 Hadrian 5, 71, 72–4, 105 Haemus, Mt 88 Harmodius 73 Hedone see Voluptas Herculaneum 13, 56 Hercules 11, 37, 45–6, 77, 95 Homer 19, 21, 35, 99 Honorius 92, 96 Horace 2–5, 16, 36, 37, 38, 44, 55, 62–3, 65, 81, 94, 95, 101, 104 Hortensius 7, 8, 9, 53, 100 horti Serviliani (‘Servilian Gardens’) 33 Ides of March 17, 23 Janiculum, villa of Julius Martialis on the 36–9 Jerome 92

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Johannes 94 Julia 52 Juno 37 Jupiter 77 Juvenal 29, 30, 79–84, 85–6 Labienus 91 Laertes 19 Latin language, used in philosophical works 21–2, 32 latrines, Roman 72 Laurentum, villa of Pliny the Younger at 6, 9, 59–60, 64, 87 Leontius, Bishop of Bordeaux 98–9, 100, 101 Livia 70 Livy 24, 32 locus amoenus 89 Low Ham 86 Luca, Conference of 17 Lucan 30, 33, 46–9, 71–2, 86 Lucilius 51, 52 Lucretius 14, 38, 39, 40–1, 42–3 Lucrine Lake 10 Lucullus 97 Lysippus 75 Maecenas 3–4, 71 marbles, multi-coloured 45, 90 Marius 1 Marseille 87 Martial 29, 36–9, 69, 75, 79, 86, 91 Martialis, Julius, suburban villa of 36–9 Memmius 9 Menecrates, Julius 43–4 Minicius Fundanus 55, 65 Milan 9, 63 Milichus 33 Minerva 6, 77, 79

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128 Index

Misenum 6, 56, 63 Mithradates 2, 97 Monte Mario 36 mos maiorum 13 Moselle, villas in the valley of the 89–91, 99 Naples 43, 46, 70, 78, 84, 88–9 Narbo (Narbonne) 97 Natalis 30 nature, dominance of villas over 45, 53, 60, 99 negotium 10, 58 Nemausus (Nîmes) 101 Nero 6, 7, 27–9, 30, 31, 33–5, 45, 47, 48, 70–1, 83, 85 Nerva 65 Nice 87 Niger, Bruttedius 24 noise 3–4, 29–30, 37–8 Nomentan Way 33 Octavia 7 Octavian see Augustus Old Testament 101 Olympic Games 46 Orfitus 11 Origen 101 otium 10, 12, 20, 32, 44, 58, 66, 103, 104 paintings see art, works of in villas Palatine, palace of Domitian on the 35, 40, 45, 82 Papianilla 93, 99 Papirius Paetus 19, 20 patria 18–9, 22 Parthenope 46 see also Naples Phaedrus 21 Phaon 33, 34 Pharsalus 16, 19 Philippus 22

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Philo of Larissa 16 Philodemus 14, 15, 16, 28, 32, 39, 42 Philologus 24–5 philosophy 4, 15–6, 31, 32 Piso Caesoninus, Lucius Calpurnius 14, 16, 28 Piso, Cicero’s son-in-law (Gaius Calpurnius Piso Frugi) 2 Piso, conspiracy of 28–9, 30, 47–9 Piso, Gaius Calpurnius 28–9 Placidina 99 Plato 15, 17–8, 32, 101 Pliny the Elder 7, 45, 56, 75, 81 Pliny the Younger 6, 9, 35, 36, 54–67, 93, 94, 102, 103, 104 Plotinus 102 Plotius Pegasus 83, 93 Plutarch 2, 15, 19, 24–5 Polla, widow of Lucan see Polla Argentaria Polla Argentaria 41–2, 44, 46–9, 95–6 Pollius Felix 41–7, 49, 70, 77, 79, 95–6, 99, 104–5 Pompeia Paulina 30, 31, 48 Pompeii 56 Pompey the Great 1–2, 4, 16, 17, 24 Pontius Leontius 95–7, 99, 100 Poppaea 30 portraits see art, works of in villas pottery 98 Praetorian Guards 6, 27, 85 Prefect of the City 9, 11, 83, 99, 103 Prince Consort 74 Prudentius 101 Psyche 60 Puteoli (Pozzuoli) 6, 22, 42, 44

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Index

Quintilian 78 Rabirius 5–6, 35, 76 Ravenna 85, 92,100 resistance 20, 23, 32, 49, 66 Rhine 91, 92 Romanitas 99 Romulus and Remus 79 Rufus, Calvisius 57 Rufus, Caninius 58, 59, 62, 104 Rusticiana 11 Sabines 19 Salarian Way 33, 37 Sallust 44, 75 Scaevinus 33 Scamander 99 sculptures see art, works of in villas Sebasta see Augustalia Sejanus, Aelius 52 Seneca the Elder 24, 75 Seneca the Younger 2, 8, 30–3, 37–8, 47, 51–4 Servianus 71 Servius 11 Settefinestre 44 Séviac 100 Sextilius Felix 92 Sicily 1, 69 Sidonius Apollinaris 92–7, 101–5 slaves 45, 59–61, 64 sleep 29, 58 Socrates 31, 32 Sparsus 29 Sperlonga 53 Spurinna 57, 65, 102 Statius 36, 40–9, 77, 79, 88–9, 90, 94–5 Statius the Elder 79 Stilicho 92 Stoicism 51, 53 Subrius Flavus 27, 28, 29, 31 Suebi 92

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Suetonius 6, 33–5, 44, 69, 70, 72, 76, 77 Sulla 1 Surrentum (Sorrento) 40, 49, 77, 96, 99 Symmachus 9–12 Tacitus 6, 7, 8, 9, 30–3, 52, 63, 70, 77, 86 Terence 93, 94 Tiberius 7, 52, 53, 75–6, 102 Tibur (Tivoli) 3, 36, 40, 55, 64, 92, 95, 96 Tibur (Tivoli), villa of Hadrian at 5, 72–4 Tifernum Tiberinum 64, 67 Tigellinus 30 Tiro 25 Titus 77, 78 Torquatus, Manlius 2–3 Trajan 35, 55, 65–6, 67 Treveri 91, 92 Trier 9, 89, 91, 100 Tullia 20 turbot, giant 80–3 Tuscany, villa of Pliny the Younger in 63–5 Turranius Rufinus 101 Tutor, Julius 92 Tusculum, villa of Cicero at 15–6, 20, 21, 22, 24, 98, 101 Valentinian I 89, 92 Valentinian II 9 Vandals 92 Varro 7, 19, 20, 101 Vatia, Servilius 52–4, 56, 58, 102 Venantius Fortunatus 98–9, 100 Venus 40 Vespasian 48, 85, 92 Vesuvius, eruption of 13, 56 Via Tecta 36 Victoria, Queen 69, 74

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130 Index

Victory, Altar of 9 villas, Cicero’s 15, 22, 24–5 see also Arpinum, villa of Cicero at; Tusculum, villa of Cicero at villas, Pliny the Younger’s 63, 64 see also Laurentum, villa of Pliny the Younger at; Tuscany, villa of Pliny the Younger in villas, suburban 29–30, 33–5, 104

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Villa of the Papyri 13–4, 15, 28, 39 Vindex 87 Virgil 6, 11, 86, 89–90, 93 Visigoths 92 Voconius Romanus 63 Voluptas 40–1 Vopiscus, Manilius 40–1, 90, 95, 99 Vulcan 90 wolves 98

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