A Life in the Day: A Review of Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome.

[uvula_fr_b4]

I recently read Jérôme Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome: The People and the City at the Height of Empire (translated from the French by E.O. Lorimer; edited with bibliography and notes by Henry T. Rowell; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940, 1968 [undated reprint]; trade paperback; ISBN: 0-300-00031-6; 342 pps.; originally published in French as Vie quotidienne a l'apogée de l'empire); I started it around 2 October (Monday) or 3 October (Tuesday), and finished it on Thursday, 19 October. At last: a book of Roman history that doesn't take me nearly half a year to read. (Anthony A. Barrett's Caligula: The Corruption of Power, I'm looking at you.)

"The Height of Empire" is defined here as being under the rule of Trajan (98-117 AD), who is the second of what are called the Five Good Emperors (which consist of, in order, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius; their combined reigns span from 96-180 AD); this doesn't stop Carcopino from bouncing around a bit, from the mid-Republic period to the reigns of Commodus and Caracalla, with brief sidebars into the reigns of Constantine and Honorius.

Given the fragmentary evidence (and yes, Carcopino avers that the archaeological evidence for life in second century Rome is quite considerable; however, I would argue that, just as written records can only tell you so much about life in a specific period, so too is archaeology limited in its ability to recover the past) and the author's inability or unwillingness to confine himself to the period in his title, Daily Life in Ancient Rome reads a bit like a science fiction or fantasy novel in that the sense of time is very plastic: one era overlaps another, so that Rome ultimately becomes a palimpsest, with past and future incarnations of the Eternal City peering forth at the same time like ghostly quantum apparitions. Another author might've addressed this effect head-on -- think of Michael Moorcock or Alan Moore -- but Carcopino seems blithely unaware of and unconcerned by it, so that this aspect serves to drag his narrative down rather than enhance it.

Carcopino (and his translator Lorimer) does manage to deliver the occasional nice turn of phrase; however, while the book is much better written than Barrett's Caligula, it suffers from the author's blind assumption that anything Christian must, perforce, be good, certainly better than anything "pagan," and that no one who was not Christian could be truly moral. I share Carcopino's high dudgeon at the "games" or munera (human sacrifices; one was a munus) of the later Roman Republic and Roman Empire -- one of the less savory adoptions of Etruscan culture which the Romans made, and amplified far beyond anything that the Etruscans ever knew -- which were chiefly comprised of the hoplomachia or gladiatorial combat, and the venationes (animal contests or hunts; human participants, as opposed to victims, in these events were not gladiators, however: they were the bestiarii); but I find incredible, if not laughable, his refusal to acknowledge that Christianity in general, and the Roman Catholic Church in particular, was for several centuries every bit as cruel and sanguine an institution as any government of Rome ever was.

Another annoyance of Daily Life is that it threatens at several points to degenerate into a laundry list of Latin terms; if I ever follow through on my half-assed notion to actually attempt to study classical Latin, this feature will make Daily Life a desideratum. As it stands, however, I nearly used up my blue highlighter on just this book.

Enough of the overview; on to what I thought were some of the most interesting bits of information and trivia, behind the cut.

• Carcopino gives a very shrewd and persuasive account of the extent of Rome and what its population must have been; he treats the various sources and modern (c. 1880s - 1930s; keep in mind the book's original publication date) historians and archaeologists in their turn before concluding that "The available data combine to force us to conclude that the inhabitants of Rome must have reached nearly a million" (p. 18) during the reign of Augustus (27 BC - 14 AD). During the course of his reasoning, however, Carcopino, a historian, manages to argue that we cannot know something from "mere history" (p. 15).
  
  
• Carcopino's time in Algeria -- 1912-1920, with a little interruption known to us as World War I -- is evident due to his repeated references to the colony in particular and "Moslem lands" in general, and his likening of certain aspects of life in ancient Rome -- the narrow warren of streets, the restrictions against women, the mealtime customs -- to those of Algeria.
  
  
• Insulae, or apartment buildings (singular: insula), were characterized by their height; they were, in a very real sense, the skyscrapers of the ancient world, but thanks to shoddy construction and insufficient enforcement of the building codes, they were also subject to frequent collapse, either of their own accord, or due to the energies of wreckers hired by the owner-landlords who were anxious to swiftly erect a newer, superficially more attractive apartment house for which they could charge higher rents. "As early as the third century B.C insulae of three stories...were so frequent that they had ceased to excite remark" (p.24); by the time of Augustus and Trajan, insulae of five and six stories were the norm (p. 26).
  
  
• Carcopino notes the congruence between modern (1930s) Rome and ancient Rome, as well as a notable difference: "If they could rise from the dead, the subjects of Trajan or Hadrian would feel they had come home when they crossed the threshold of these modern Roman casoni; but they might with justice complain that in external appearance their houses had lost rather than gained in the course of the ages" (p. 29).
  
  
• "..the most opulent of the insulae suffered from the fragility of their construction, the scantiness of their furniture, insufficient light and heat, and absence of sanitation" (p. 30). This means that even the ritzier apartment complexes in ancient Rome were little more than glorified tenements. On a related note, the noise of the Eternal City was such that most people who lived within its confines complained of insomnia; but even the well-to-do and the wealthy who could retire to a domus (mansion) outside the city proper and further insulate themselves from unwanted noise by leaving an empty corridor between the main part of their house and their sleeping quarters likely couldn't linger overlong a'bed unless they had drank themselves into a stupor before retiring, thanks to the clamor made by the squads of their household slaves who were turned out before dawn to begin their daily tasks of maintaining their master's domus.
  
  
• Tables as we know them -- four-legged -- were only "introduced late in history through the intermediary of Christian rites" (p. 34). Sturdy tables a Christian invention? (Or, more likely, a Christian borrowing from some damn place; if I had to guess, I'd say that early Christians would've been more predisposed towards three-legged tables...) Huh. Who knew?
  
  
• While imperial Rome had a night watch of sorts, it didn't have any streetlights except on special occasions; everybody who possibly could barricaded himself in his home before night fell (p. 47).
  
  
• The Romans had sulfur matches (p. 48).
  
  
• Because of the size of the population and the narrowness of most of the streets, no wagons or carts (save those of contractors engaged in the wrecking of a building "to reconstruct it on better and hygienic lines;" p. 49) were allowed in Rome during the day: the only traffic permitted was "pedestrians, horsemen, litters and carrying chairs" (p. 49). This accounts for the infernal racket that resounded from one end of Rome to the other after nightfall, even without streetlights: night-time was the only time when teamsters of varying stripes could travel through Rome. This restriction gave an extra kick to the triumphs of various generals: they were allowed to drive a cart through Rome in broad daylight. I suspect that the closest equivalent we might have to this is being able to rip-ass in a sports car or motorcycle through a city's streets without fear of either cops or traffic.
  
  
• In the second century AD, the number of people (almost always men; see pps. 182-83) who received public assistance (named after the goddess Annona) grew from 150,000 to 175,000; allowing for a variation between three and five persons per family, this means that "Directly or indirectly...at least one-third and possibly one-half of the population of the city lived on public charity" (p. 65). There's an important "but" to this, however:
  
  "But we should be wrong to conclude that two-thirds or one-half of the population were independent of it, for the total of the population includes three classes [that were] ineligible for the distributions of free grain: the soldiers of the garrison -- at the lowest computation some 12,000 men; the peregrini [travelers] passing through Rome, whose numbers we cannot calculate; and finally the slaves, whose ratio to the free inhabitants may have been at least one to three... If we suppose that Trajan's Rome had a population of 1,200,000 souls, we may deduct 400,000 slaves. This leaves less than 150,000 heads of Roman families who were sufficiently well off not to need to draw on the largesse of Annona."
  
  -- ibid
  
  So in a very real sense, Rome, long admired and decried as a symbol of empire, was a welfare state. Wonder what Niall Ferguson would say to that?
  
  
• Rome had a stock exchange (p. 73). In keeping with this, Carcopino notes: "Work might still ensure a modest living, but no longer yielded such fortunes as the chance of imperial favour or a speculative gamble might bestow" (ibid). He adds, "Outside the city, the middle classes still found it worth while to believe in the value of work, but inside Rome they had lost all confidence in it" (p. 74). Not too much like the modern-day United States of America, eh..?
  
  
• Abandoning a newborn baby -- within the precincts of Rome, usually by placing the child in a cess trench (lacus) -- wasn't considered a crime until the beginning of the third century (p. 77). "A father's right to slay his child was still recognized in the first century B.C....but had later become a capital crime" (ibid). Interestingly enough, for all that Rome was a patriarchy, it wasn't until the reign of the emperor Constantine (r. 306-337 AD) that parricide was equated with the murder of a son (ibid).
  
  
• I never bought Carcopino's assertion that, "Contrary to general opinion...it is certain that the Roman woman of the epoch we are studying enjoyed a dignity and an independence at least equal if not superior to those claimed by contemporary feminists" (p. 85): for one thing, he's a bit too glib in dismissing their supposed accomplishments ("By copying men too closely the Roman woman succeeded more rapidly in emulating man's vices than in acquiring his strength;" p. 92); for another, the occasional misogynistic jibes that he lets slip ("The Roman woman of those days was so deeply rooted in indolence that she apparently was not much oftener seen in shops as a purchaser than as an employee," p. 182; and "..the women of Rome were not busy people like their men, and to confess the truth they took no part in the public life of Rome except in its hours of leisure," p. 170; see too his sneers about "voluntary birth control") don't give me much confidence that women weren't in effect reined in by a kind of purdah. He is inadvisably optimistic about the lack of portraiture of women in Roman ruins, interpreting this absence as proof that they weren't part of daily life due to "indolence," when it is at least as likely that women weren't part of banausic concerns because they weren't permitted, either by formal law or social custom, to be. The fact that women apparently weren't direct recipients of "the bounty of Annona" (p. 182) shouldn't suggest that there were in Rome neither widows nor women whose husbands or sons were, for one reason or another, unable to receive the dole into their hands. I suspect that most of the women whom Carcopino focuses on are those of the middle class (Equites: the equestrian class, or "Roman knights") on up rather than a representative slice of the more numerous common people.
  
  
• Here's another parallel between the Roman Empire and the U.S.:
  
  "Rome's political supremacy, her gigantic urban development, condemned her to display intense and unremitting activity not only in speculation and trade but in varied manufactures and productive work. Let us reflect that all the roads of Italy led to Rome, and all the lines of Mediterranean navigation, and that Rome, Queen of the World, attracted the best of the earth's products. She arrogated to herself the financing and direction of the world's activities and claimed the right to consume the world's riches. It is obvious that she had to toil unceasingly after her fashion to maintain this dominion."
  
  -- p. 174
  
  
• About that "unceasing toil," though: "The Romans were among the last to appreciate the need" of time-keeping; "..just as they felt no need to count the hours till two centuries after the Athenians, so they took another hundred years to learn to do it accurately" (p. 145). Wait, wage-slaves, it gets better: "Not only is it probable that they had contrived so to arrange matters that the eight-hour day would not be exceeded even in summer, but in my opinion by the second century of our era they had succeeded in shortening the working day even further" (p. 183). "If one bears in mind that the 'hour' at the winter solstice equalled forty-five minutes according to our reckoning and seventy-five minutes at the summer solstice, these data bring the Roman working day down to about seven hours in summer and less than six in winter" (p. 184). In the period of Nerva and Trajan, "the merchants and shopkeepers, the artisans and labourers of the imperial race, upheld by their vital professional unions, had succeeded in so organising their work as to allow themselves seventeen or eighteen of our twenty-four hours for the luxury of repose and enjoyed what we may call if we care to the leisure of people of means" (ibid). The most militant French union cardholder of today would cream his pantalon at the thought of a 30-hour work week. Carcopino rubs salt in the wound by offering this "No shit, Sherlock" observation of the blindingly obvious: "..very probably our forty-hour week with its different arrangement would have weighed heavily on [Roman workmen] rather than pleased them" (ibid).
  
  
• The preceding, combined with the number of unemployed and unemployable persons, is the reason why there were so many friggin' games in the Roman Empire: "..at the time of Claudius [r. 41-54 AD] the Roman calendar contained 159 days expressly marked as holidays, of which 93 were devoted to games given at public expense...Marcus Aurelius, his biographer tells us, restored the business year to 230 days; and from later evidence it has been reasonably conjectured that most of the remaining 135 were devoted to public spectacles." In the third century, there were "175 days of games out of about 200 public holidays, as against 93 out of 159 for the early empire, an increase from about 59 per cent to 87 per cent in the proportion of game days" (pps. 205-06). Gladiatorial combats in the second century "sometimes went on for months;" Carcopino concludes, "in the epoch we are studying Rome enjoyed at least one day of holiday for every working day" (p. 206). Whoops! Ici, Jean-Claude; have some papier-hygiénique.
  
  
• The Romans' loos were more luxuriously appointed than ours typically are; on the other hand, privacy while "answering a call of nature" was a foreign concept to them, as even the imperial palace had three-seater privies (p. 41) -- the seats were made of marble, BTW -- and a Roman latrine, or forica, was seen as a prime networking spot, where the occupants did not scruple to wait to begin a conversation or issue a dinner invitation until after they -- or the person whom they were addressing -- finished their business. On a somewhat related note, the Romans apparently didn't blow their noses into handkerchiefs until around the end of the third century (p. 170), which means that, in addition to the imperfect coverage by the sewer system, the Romans likely snorted the impedimenting contents of their nostrils onto the ground or floor, if they didn't simply pick and flick (or pick and wipe onto their clothes). So much for the glory that was Rome.
  

In closing I should mention that Daily Life in Ancient Rome has one of the best indexes I've seen since I've started spot-checking the indexes of the books I read (about eight or nine years ago); I had to make hardly any additions, although I'll confess to not checking very often to see if the author's references to relatively modern European (and Algerian) history were tracked by the index. (I did note what seems to be his sole mention of Mussolini: p. 213.)

This is the second book of Roman history that I've read that was written and published on the eve or the very beginning of the Second World War; the other was Sir Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution (1939), which I gather was somewhat controversial for the muted parallels which he drew between the regime of Augustus and that of Hitler's Germany, and the fact that he noted that Augustus didn't really have much choice but to be an autocrat in order to salvage the state. (One can almost hear the triumphant "I told you sos!" of the Nazis and their many supporters, and the groans and outraged fulminations of their opponents.) I subsequently learned that Carcopino was a member of the Vichy government for a year; he also served as Raymond Poincaré's secretary in 1912: Poincaré was a politician so anti-German that he is "credited" by some, first as prime minister and later as president, for dragging France into the debacle that became known as World War One. It's probably too much to dismiss Carcopino as a collaborator based on this; but some at least of his right-wing leanings are in evidence in Daily Life, so it wouldn't knock me back on my heels if he was one. A right-wing, even fascistic, historian of the Roman Empire? Nom du chien! Who knew??