The Roman world was opened up both physically and mentally. The Principate brought improved roads, made safer from brigands, sea-lanes at risk from weather rather than pirates. But more important was mental attitude. A new mood of optimistic imperialism encouraged Italians to
IM CIL vi 53960= 10097, Ti. Claudius Esquilina Aug(usti libertus) Tiberinus. Note that the tribe is given '... Roma mihi patria est, media de plebe parentes ...'. Brunt 1971 (f i 2) 148ЛГdraws up a balance-sheet of the socio-economic situation of the rural and urban plebs under the Empire.
enjoy that share in the empire which two generations earlier had been denied them and annexed new cidzens to the service of Rome. Provincials recognized that they belonged to an empire ruled from Rome (Luke 2:1). As it was natural for a clever young man from Sulmo to make a career in Rome, whether he decided to be a senator or a poet, so humbler Italians marched out to all the frontiers, to war down the proud and exploit, bully, love or learn from the local people. If we look at the experience of the citizen of non-Italian descent, we see that by the time of Nero, Paul knows people he can write to not only in cities of the Greek East, but in Rome and the household of Caesar. It is hard to imagine that his opposite number in republican Rome would have had a similar mental map.
In upper-class life, Vespasian marks a sharper social break than Augustus. A change of taste, personified by the Sabine grandson of a Pompeian centurion, accomplished the switch in mores which Augustan legislation had been powerless to effect. People like Velleius or the Plinies now outnumbered survivors of a frivolous society like Ummidia Quadratilla. According to Tacitus' diagnosis, luxury and display, which lasted from Actium to the war of a.d. 68/9, gave way to parsimony, when they became dangerous and when new men of simpler tastes came to power. Or is there merely a cyclical pattern (Tac. Ann. 111.55)? Cicero and Horace would perhaps have been disappointed by the change they had advocated. But the demographic problems remained. Rome never had hereditary monarchy or hereditary Senate. Some sons of senators lost their census qualification, some opted out, some families lacked sons. Equites might, like Ovid (Tr. 1v.10.27ff, cf. Hor. Sat. n.3.i68ff), refuse promotion. A trickle of the new rich, often freedmen, percolated into the higher strata: their sons were equites, their grandsons even senators. Members of the richest classes moved in and out of functions in high administration.
Society changed between 44 в.с. and a.d. 69. Some developments, such as the improved right of succession given to women, seem to have happened because views of the family continued to move further away from patriarchy and emphasis on agnatic relationships. Augustus merely hastened this trend. Others, such as greater social mobility up or down, were caused or increased by the major upheaval of the civil wars. Where before there had been a number of principes viri at the top of the social, economic and political pyramid, the emperor now stood alone and his kin and close associates occupied the strata below him. The whole of society felt the effect of his presence. For instance, his servants, particularly Augusti liberti, outranked other freedmen and might even, for wealth and influence, counterbalance senators. But no emperor could alter the basic social structures, even had he wished. The rights of citizens to own slaves and to enfranchize by manumission were unassailable. Marriage remained consensual. Reproductivity continued to be controlled by living conditions, not fiat. Planned legislation had less effect than the superimposition of an emperor on the constitutional, economic and social structure and the actions of the individual rulers. The effect of these was to unify the empire as never before; to draw in foreigners to the citizenship and recruits to the army and higher administration, and to produce a more broadly based and transient elite of officials within the upper classes. Beneath the princeps, Roman society remained a pyramid, but peace, prosperity and enfranchizement increased the relative size of the propertied classes within the cidzen body. The social structure of the ruling elite survived the Julio-Claudian period, but its membership and tone were transformed.
Emperors affected society by legislation and the deliberate institution of certain pracuces, by individual acts of patronage (beneficia), by acquiescing in practices or institutions initiated by others, by the example which they set and by just 'being there'. Augustus deliberately undertook social engineering; his successors were normally concerned to continue what he had begun. Social legislation was effective in setting up a framework in which people should operate, but not in attacking perceived moral problems. The emperors stimulated social developments which were not the primary object of their actions or over which they had no direct control. It would be naive to expect otherwise.
CHAPTER 19 LITERATURE AND SOCIETY
GAVIN TOWNEND
i. definition of the period
While the age of Golden Latin is accepted as straddling the late republican and Augustan periods, the division between these two is particularly arbitrary, with no satisfactory date to set as the boundary — neither the death of Cicero in 43 B.C. nor the victory of Octavian in 31. Sallust survived into the 30s, but is properly classified as republican on the basis both of subject-matter and of atdtudes; Nepos, soil alive several years after Acdum, likewise looks back to the last period of the Republic and shows no real affinity to the new age; Marcus Varro produced a great part of his work during Cicero's lifetime and his De Re Rustica in 37/36 b.c., although he was still writing when he died in 27, the year when the name 'Augustus' appeared, to distinguish the new era beyond doubt. On the other hand, within a year or two of 40 в.с. the emergence of Octavian Caesar as champion and saviour in the first Eclogue establishes Virgil as an Augustan from the start; while the fourth of the series, for all its puzzles, is already looking into a future of peace and prosperity. The dedication to Maecenas of both Epodes and Satires 1 attaches Horace openly to the imperial entourage, even if the decisive poems belong relatively late in the decade. The 30s are in every way a period of transidon, in literature as in politics. The two previous decades had seen the great advances of Catullus, Lucredus and Cicero, the last with his expressed determinadon to make Ladn literature the equal of Greek in every department. In the 20s a confident professionalism manifests itself, with the major theme of patriotism flowering in the Augustan peace and with unthreatened leisure for the romantic games of elegiac and lyric poetry. The lessons of Cicero's mastery of language for a whole range of literary purposes are available for application to poetry and prose alike, without yet becoming stereotyped as technique replaces original imagination, but with ars matching ingenium even more completely than Cicero had observed in the work of Lucredus.
Yet from the start imagination had its limitations. The emulation of Greek models so desired by Cicero was to lead inexorably to the summing-up by Quintilian towards the close of the following century,
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