The picture of virtue, industry, and economy does not tell the complete truth. Away from Rome and out of the public view, Augustus and his family lived in grand and extravagant style. Suetonius claims that his country houses were “modest enough”; he cannot have visited the rocky island of Pandateria (today’s Ventotene) thirty miles or so west of Naples, where the princeps built a palace, now undergoing a major excavation.
The island’s longer axis lies north–south and runs a little more than one and a half miles. All we know of Pandateria in antiquity is that it was plagued with field mice, which nibbled the sprawling grapes. It has no springs or rivers and large cisterns were built to collect rainwater. A small port was constructed, cut into the tufa, for landing building materials, food, wine, and other supplies. In the north, the island narrows and rises to a small plateau (where today’s cemetery stands). Here lie the remains of a building with many rooms, which were probably reserved for servants, slaves, and guards. The ground then dips and narrows into a small valley, where fountains played and a colonnaded portico with seats created a pleasant spot for conversation. A steep stairway led down to a small quay, giving family members and their guests private access to the villa.
Finally, the main house was reached by walking up from the valley to where it perched on a rocky promontory overlooking steep cliffs. The building was shaped like a horseshoe with a garden in the middle; it contained dining rooms, a bathing complex, and other living spaces. At the tip of the promontory, a viewing platform offered an uninterrupted panorama of sky and sea.
Here was secret splendor, where the princeps could entertain his intimate circle in undisturbed privacy. This was as it needed to be, for some of his friends were disreputable, not the kind of people with whom he should be seen in public. His dear Maecenas was a sybarite, but a civilized and able man. The same could not be said of the son of a wealthy freeman, the unappetizing Publius Vedius Pollio, who apparently helped establish a taxation system in the province of Asia after Actium. On one occasion Vedius went too far, even for his august friend.
Vedius had tanks where he kept giant eels that had been trained to devour men, and he was in the habit of throwing to them slaves who had incurred his displeasure. Once, when he was entertaining Augustus at dinner, a waiter broke a valuable crystal goblet. Paying no attention to his guest, the infuriated Vedius ordered the slave to be thrown to the eels. The boy fell on his knees in front of the princeps, begging for protection. Augustus tried to persuade Vedius to change his mind. When Vedius paid no attention, he said: “Bring all your other drinking vessels like this one, or any others of value that you possess for me to use.”
When they were brought, he ordered all of them to be smashed. Vedius could not punish a servant for an offense that Augustus had repeated, and the waiter was pardoned.
Despite his public endorsement of strict private morals, Augustus apparently led (as already noted) a various and vigorous sex life. It was common knowledge, according to Ovid, that his house
though refulgent with portraits
of antique heroes, also contains, somewhere,
a little picture depicting the various sexual positions
and modes.
Mark Antony once accused Augustus of dragging a former consul’s wife from her husband’s dining room into the bedroom—according to the startled Suetonius, “before his eyes, too!” Friends, among them a slave dealer called Toranius, used to arrange his pleasures for him, stripping women of their clothes so that they could be inspected as if they were slaves up for sale. Even as an elderly man Augustus is said “still to have harboured a passion for deflowering girls, who were collected for him from every quarter, even by his wife!”
The great attract gossip, and it is not mandatory to believe these saucy tales. However, it is worth noting that, according to the sexual mores of upper-class Romans, there was nothing especially out of the ordinary about the behavior attributed to the princeps (consider, at a lower social level, Horace’s unabashed confessions). Antony launched his accusation only because he was on the defensive about Cleopatra. Augustus’ sexual rapacity seems to have been a matter of common report throughout his life.
After exercising and bathing, Augustus and Livia approached the high point of the day, the cena or main meal. This started at about three in the afternoon and was an important means by which Romans socialized. It was not exclusively a family affair and guests were often invited. Clubs and societies of every kind held regular feasts, and leading aristocrats invited one another to an annual cena.
Dinner parties took place in the triclinium. This was a dining room furnished with three communal couches, which were covered by mattresses and arranged along three sides of the room with a table in the center (for larger gatherings the triple-couch layout was simply repeated). There were also tables for drinks. Up to three diners per couch reclined alongside one another, like sardines, with their heads nearest the table and their left elbows propped on cushions. Lying down to eat was a highly prized luxury; when Cato vowed to eat his meals upright as long as Julius Caesar’s tyranny lasted, he was felt to be making a real sacrifice. Women sat on chairs, although it was becoming fashionable for them to recline with the men. If allowed to be present, children used stools in front of their fathers’ places.
An advisory inscription on the wall of a house at Pompeii from the first century A.D. gives a good idea of how lively these social events could be:
Do not cast lustful glances or make eyes at another man’s wife.
Do not be coarse in your conversation.
Restrain yourself from getting angry or using offensive language. If you cannot do so, then go home.
Augustus gave frequent dinner parties, but in his case there was no need for instructions of this kind. These were rather elaborate occasions and great attention was paid both to social precedence and to achieving a good balance of personalities on the guest list. Usually not greatly interested in eating, the princeps would often arrive late and leave early, letting his guests start and finish without him.
An usher (nomenclator) announced the diners as they entered. Their hands and feet were washed before they were shown to their places. They were provided with knives, spoons, and toothpicks, as well as napkins. Forks had not yet been invented as tools to eat with; guests helped themselves to food with their hands. Waiters brought in dishes and bowls and laid them on the table. Debris, such as shells and bones, was dropped onto the floor and swept up.
The meal opened with the gustatio, tasting, during which appetizers were served—various pulses, cabbage in vinegar, pickled fruit and vegetables, strongly spiced mashes of shrubs and weeds such as nettle, sorrel, and elder, and snails, clams, and small fish. A fashionable delicacy was stuffed and roast dormice. A wine-and-honey mixture accompanied the gustatio.
The main course consisted of a variety of meat dishes; favorites included wild boar, turbot, chicken, and sows’ udders. Fifty ways of dressing pork were known. There were no side dishes, but bread rolls were available. A sauce called garum or liquamen was added to almost everything. Garum was made from slowly decomposed mackerel intestines; its closest (if distant) modern equivalents are Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce and Worcestershire sauce. Finally, dessert consisted of fruit, nuts, and cakes soaked in honey.