Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero | Page 3

his failure to
produce a substitute for it; Stoic attitude towards religion: Stoicism
finds room for the gods of the State; Varro's treatment of theology on
Stoic lines; his monotheistic conception of Jupiter Capitolinus; the
Stoic Jupiter a legal rather than a moral deity; Jupiter in the Aeneid;
superstition of the age; belief in portents, visions, etc.; ideas of
immortality; sense of sin, or despair of the future.
* EPILOGUE
* INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS
PLAN OF HOUSE OF THE SILVER WEDDING AT POMPEII
MAP TO ILLUSTRATE THE POSITION OF CICERO'S VILLAS

PLAN OF THE VILLA OF DIOMEDES AT POMPEII
PLAN OF A TRICLINIUM

MAP
ROME IN THE LAST YEARS OF THE REPUBLIC At end of Volume

Translations of passages in foreign languages in this book will be found
in the Appendix following page 362.
CHAPTER I
TOPOGRAPHICAL
The modern traveller of to-day arriving at Rome by rail drives to his
hotel through the uninteresting streets of a modern town, and thence
finds his way to the Forum and the Palatine, where his attention is
speedily absorbed by excavations which he finds it difficult to
understand. It is as likely as not that he may leave Rome without once
finding an opportunity of surveying the whole site of the ancient city,
or of asking, and possibly answering the question, how it ever came to
be where it is. While occupied with museums and picture-galleries, he
may well fail "totam aestimare Romam."[1] Assuming that the reader
has never been in Rome, I wish to transport him thither in imagination,
and with the help of the map, by an entirely different route. But first let
him take up the eighth book of the Aeneid, and read afresh the oldest
and most picturesque of all stories of arrival at Rome;[2] let him
dismiss all handbooks from his mind, and concentrate it on Aeneas and
his ships on their way from the sea to the site of the Eternal City.
Virgil showed himself a true artist in bringing his hero up the Tiber,
which in his day was freely used for navigation up to and even above
the city. He saw that by the river alone he could land him exactly where
he could be shown by his friendly host, almost at a glance, every

essential feature of the site, every spot most hallowed by antiquity in
the minds of his readers. Rowing up the river, which graciously
slackened its swift current, Aeneas presently caught sight of the walls
and citadel, and landed just beyond the point where the Aventine hill
falls steeply almost to the water's edge. Here in historical times was the
dockyard of Rome; and here, when the poet was a child, Cato had
landed with the spoils of Cyprus, as the nearest point of the river for the
conveyance of that ill-gotten gain to the treasury under the Capitol.[3]
Virgil imagines the bank clothed with wood, and in the wood--where
afterwards was the Forum Boarium, a crowded haunt--Aeneas finds
Evander sacrificing at the Ara maxima of Hercules, of all spots the best
starting-point for a walk through the heart of the ancient city. To the
right was the Aventine, rising to about a hundred and thirty feet above
the river, and this was the first of the hills of Rome to be impressed on
the mind of the stranger, by the tale of Hercules and Cacus which
Evander tells his guest. In front, but close by, was the long western
flank of the Palatine hill, where, when the tale had been told and the
rites of Hercules completed, Aeneas was to be shown the cave of the
Lupercal; and again to the left, approaching the river within two
hundred yards, was the Capitol to be:
Hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit, Aurea nunc, olim
silvestribus horrida dumis.
Below it the hero is shown the shrine of the prophetic nymph Carmenta,
with the Porta Carmentalis leading into the Campus Martius; then the
hollow destined one day to be the Forum Romanum, and beyond it, in
the valley of the little stream that here found its way down from the
plain beyond, the grove of the Argiletum. Here, and up the slope of the
Clivus sacer, with which we shall presently make acquaintance, were
the lowing herds of Evander, who then takes his guest to repose for the
night in his own dwelling on the Palatine, the site of the most ancient
Roman settlement.[4]
What Evander showed to his visitor, as we shall presently see,
comprised the whole site of the heart and life of the city as it was to be,
all that lay under the steep sides of the three almost isolated hills, the

Capitoline, Palatine, and Aventine. The poet knew that he need not
extend their walk to the other