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Introduction
| New research | Status
Patronage and business |
The
household | Pleasures of
the flesh
Core values | Find
out more
In Pompeii – indeed, in Roman society as a whole – money was
less important than one's birthright. Even the wealthiest freed slave
could never aspire to the positions open to free-born citizens. However,
the quest for status remained the defining feature of Roman life.
The imperial cult stood at the heart of religious and cultural life.
This represented its founder – the emperor Augustus (ruled 27 BC-AD
14) – as a semi-divine father of the people. Pompeii at this time
was characterised by accelerated social mobility and the social and cultural
tensions to which it gave rise. Augustus had shown great foresight by
allowing freedmen to hold minor office in his cult. This became a safety
valve for the frustrations of a growing and ambitious group.
Public office
It was public service – both civic and religious – that
conferred status. Holding public office brought with it certain perks,
the greatest of which were those that allowed the office-holder to display
his status. However, holding public office was subject to quite a number
of restrictions. The most important of these were financial, to ensure
that the office holder could afford to fulfil his onerous duties as a
civic benefactor.
You might assume that restrictions on who could stand for public office
would perpetuate social divisions. In fact, the weight of financial responsibilities,
especially in Pompeii after the earthquake, opened up new possibilities
for successful freedmen. They could lend money to potential office-holders
and so gain power over those who ostensibly ruled them. Or endow funds
for the construction of buildings that would bear inscriptions to their
patron – or even the patron's son.
Home as stage
Status was all. Even 'home' wasn't the private retreat we are familiar
with, but a public space, projecting the owner's identity or public persona.
One of the major findings of the new research is that the villas of Pompeii
were laid out and decorated like stage sets, to reinforce the image of
their owners' status. According to historian Mary Beard ...
By carefully matching up surviving architecture with different styles
of wall decoration, by thinking afresh about such simple problems as
what you could actually see when you walked through the front door of
a house, and by comparing what remains with Vitruvius' 1st-century handbook
On Architecture, archaeologists have put 'domestic space' back
at the centre of Roman social and political history. The housing of
the Roman élite, so this new orthodoxy goes, was not 'private',
in the sense of hiding the inmates from public view, but a key extension
of the owner's political persona, a stage specifically designed to be
a backdrop to his public role as patron and magistrate.
Although some Roman authors famously declaimed against conspicuous expenditure
on the home, Pompeians did not see luxury as a senseless waste. Rather,
it was a social necessity in a highly competitive society. Pompeii's upper
classes spent huge amounts of money on their houses because they had to
– their neighbours and clients were watching.
Finally, how a man was memorialised after death was also of great importance.
The living revered their ancestors in regular rituals, and a dead man's
status was reflected on his descendants.
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The patrician's son
Gaius Terentius Sabinus is the only son of a patrician father,
from a family that was influential on the political scene in the
past but has fallen from prominence in the last few years.
A weak man who has been indulged throughout his life, Gaius suddenly
finds himself having to justify his existence. An ambitious freedman
has latched on to his slightly senile father and is convincing him
to name him as his heir rather than the wastrel son. Gaius’s
father gives his son an ultimatum: make your family proud by winning
office in the forthcoming election or be disinherited. Reluctantly
Gaius agrees.
Married with two small children, both Gaius and his wife are notorious
libertines, with appetites for drink and lovers of both sexes. The
challenge of making himself respectable enough to win public office
is daunting.
To stand a chance of winning the election for duumvir (colonial
magistrate), Gaius must mix with those he has always disdained.
Only with the financial backing of men like Scaurus, the arriviste
freedman (see box
in Patronage and business), can Gaius afford to fulfil the promises
of public works that are a requirement for an electoral candidate.
Ingratiating himself with the lower classes is distasteful to Gaius
– how far is he prepared to swallow his pride to win financial
security?
The sudden collapse of his father into senile dementia at exactly
the moment when Gaius finally achieves the public position that
was always expected of him is deeply ironic. Laden with responsibility
and unable now to share in the kind of pleasure-seeking that his
wife continues to enjoy, Gaius finds himself with the need to defend
his inheritance removed yet with none of the rewards of parental
approval.
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