History of Rome from the Earliest Times down to 476 AD | Page 9

desires which animated these men of wealth and influence were chiefly
the product of the new cosmopolitan culture which the victorious city
had begun to absorb in the days when conquest and diplomacy had first
been carried across the seas. To this she fell a willing victim when the
conquered peoples, bending before the rude force which had but
substituted a new suzerainty for an old and had scarcely touched their
inner life, began to display before the eyes of their astonished
conquerors the material comfort and the spiritual charm which, in the
case of the contact of a potent but narrow civilisation with one that is
superbly elastic and strong in the very elegance of its physical debility,
can always turn defeat into victory. But the student who begins his
investigation of the new Roman life with the study of Roman society as
it existed in the latter half of the second century before our era, cannot

venture to gather up the threads of the purely intellectual and moral
influences which were created by the new Hellenistic civilisation. He
feels that he is only at the beginning of a process, that he lacks material
for his picture, that the illustrative matter which he might employ is to
be found mainly in the literary records of a later age, and that his use of
this matter would but involve him in the historical sins of anticipation
and anachronism. Of some phases of the war between the old spirit and
the new we shall find occasion to speak; but the culminating point
attained by the blend of Greek with Roman elements is the only one
which is clearly visible to modern eyes. This point, however, was
reached at the earliest only in the second half of the next century. It was
only then that the fusion of the seemingly discordant elements gave
birth to the new "Romanism," which was to be the ruling civilisation of
Italy and the Western provinces and, in virtue of the completeness of
the amalgamation and the novelty of the product, was itself to be
contrasted and to live for centuries in friendly rivalry with the more
uncompromising Hellenism of Eastern lands. But some of the
economic effects of the new influences claim our immediate attention,
for we are engaged in the study of the beginnings of an economic
revolution, and an analysis must therefore be attempted of some of the
most pressing needs and some of the keenest desires which were
awakened by Hellenism, either in the purer dress which old Greece had
given it or in the more gorgeous raiment which it had assumed during
its sojourn in the East.
A tendency to treat the city as the home, the country only as a means of
refreshment and a sphere of elegant retirement during that portion of
the year when the excitement of the urban season, its business and its
pleasure, were suspended, began to be a marked feature of the life of
the upper classes. The man of affairs and the man of high finance were
both compelled to have their domicile in the town, and, if agriculture
was still the staple or the supplement of their wealth, the needs of the
estate had to be left to the supervision of the resident bailiff.[19] This
concentration of the upper classes in the city necessarily entailed a
great advance in the price and rental of house property within the walls.
It is true that the reckless prices paid for houses, especially for country
villas, by the grandees and millionaires of the next generation,[20] had

not yet been reached; but the indications with which we are furnished
of the general rise of prices for everything in Rome that could be
deemed desirable by a cultivated taste,[21] show that the better class of
house property must already have yielded large returns, whether it were
sold or let, and we know that poor scions of the nobility, if business or
pleasure induced them to spend a portion of the year in Rome, had soon
to climb the stairs of flats or lodgings.[22] The pressure for room led to
the piling of storey on storey. On The roof of old houses new chambers
were raised, which could be reached by an outside stair, and either
served to accommodate the increased retinue of the town establishment
or were let to strangers who possessed no dwelling of their own;[23]
the still larger lodging-houses or "islands," which derived their name
from their lofty isolation from neighbouring buildings,[24] continued to
spring up, and even private houses soon came to attain a height which
had to be restrained by the intervention of the law. An ex-consul and
augur was called on by the censors of 125 to explain the magnitude of a
villa which he had