Only one question remains for us to answer. Did Diocletian succeed in his bold attempt to reduce the cost of living? Fortunately the answer is given us by Lactantius in the book which he wrote in 313-314 A.D., "On the Deaths of Those Who Persecuted (the Christians)." The title of Lactantius's work would not lead us to expect a very sympathetic treatment of Diocletian, the arch-persecutor, but his account of the actual outcome of the incident is hardly open to question. In Chapter VII of his treatise, after setting forth the iniquities of the Emperor in constantly imposing new burdens on the people, he writes: "And when he had brought on a state of exceeding high prices by his different acts of injustice, he tried to fix by law the prices of articles offered for sale. Thereupon, for the veriest trifles much blood was shed, and out of fear nothing was offered for sale, and the scarcity grew much worse, until, after the death of many persons, the law was repealed from mere necessity." Thus came to an end this early effort to reduce the high cost of living. Sixty years later the Emperor Julian made a similar attempt on a small scale. He fixed the price of corn for the people of Antioch by an edict. The holders of grain hoarded their stock. The Emperor brought supplies of it into the city from Egypt and elsewhere and sold it at the legal price. It was bought up by speculators, and in the end Julian, like Diocletian, had to acknowledge his inability to cope with an economic law.
Private Benefactions and Their Effect on the Municipal Life of the Romans
In the early days the authority of the Roman father over his wife, his sons, and his daughters was absolute. He did what seemed to him good for his children. His oversight and care extended to all the affairs of their lives. The state was modelled on the family and took over the autocratic power of the paterfamilias. It is natural to think of it, therefore, as a paternal government, and the readiness with which the Roman subordinated his own will and sacrificed his personal interests to those of the community seems to show his acceptance of this theory of his relation to the government. But this conception is correct in part only. A paternal government seeks to foster all the common interests of its people and to provide for their common needs. This the Roman state did not try to do, and if we think of it as a paternal government, in the ordinary meaning of that term, we lose sight of the partnership between state supervision and individual enterprise in ministering to the common needs and desires, which was one of the marked features of Roman life. In fact, the gratification of the individual citizen's desire for those things which he could not secure for himself depended in the Roman Empire, as it depends in this country, not solely on state support, but in part on state aid, and in part on private generosity. We see the truth of this very clearly in studying the history of the Roman city. The phase of Roman life which we have just noted may not fit into the ideas of Roman society which we have hitherto held, but we can understand it as no other people can, because in the United States and in England we are accustomed to the co-operation of private initiative and state action in the establishment and maintenance of universities, libraries, museums, and all sorts of charitable institutions.
If we look at the growth of private munificence under the Republic, we shall see that citizens showed their generosity particularly in the construction of public buildings, partly or entirely at their own expense. In this way some of the basilicas in Rome and elsewhere which served as courts of justice and halls of exchange were constructed. The great Basilica AEmilia, for instance, whose remains may be seen in the Forum to-day, was constructed by an AEmilius in the second century before our era, and was accepted as a charge by his descendants to be kept in condition and improved at the expense of the AEmilian family. Under somewhat similar conditions Pompey built the great theatre which bore his name, the first permanent theatre to be built in Rome, and always considered one of the wonders of the city. The cost of this structure was probably covered by the treasure which he brought back from his campaigns in the East. In using the spoils of a successful war to construct buildings or memorials in Rome, he was following the example of Mummius, the conqueror of Corinth, and other great generals who had preceded him. The purely philanthropic motive does not bulk largely in these gifts to the citizens, because the people whose armies had won the victories were part owners at least of the spoils, and because the victorious leader who built the structure was actuated more by the hope of transmitting the memory of his achievements to posterity in some conspicuous and imperishable monument than by a desire to benefit his fellow citizens.
These two motives, the one egoistic and the other altruistic, actuated all the Roman emperors in varying degrees. The activity of Augustus in such matters comes out clearly in the record of his reign, which he has left us in his own words. This remarkable bit of autobiography, known as the "Deeds of the Deified Augustus," the Emperor had engraved on bronze tablets, placed in front of his mausoleum. The original has disappeared, but fortunately a copy of it has been found on the walls of a ruined temple at Ancyra, in Asia Minor, and furnishes us abundant proof of the great improvements which he made in the city of Rome. We are told in it that from booty he paid for the construction of the Forum of Augustus, which was some four hundred feet long, three hundred wide, and was surrounded by a wall one hundred and twenty feet high, covered on the inside with marble and stucco. Enclosed within it and built with funds coming from the same source was the magnificent temple of Mars the Avenger, which had as its principal trophies the Roman standards recovered from the Parthians. This forum and temple are only two items in the long list of public improvements which Augustus records in his imperial epitaph, for, as he proudly writes: "In my sixth consulship, acting under a decree of the senate, I restored eighty-two temples in the city, neglecting no temple which needed repair at the time." Besides the temples, he mentions a large number of theatres, porticos, basilicas, aqueducts, roads, and bridges which he built in Rome or in Italy outside the city.
But the Roman people had come to look for acts of generosity from their political as well as from their military leaders, and this factor, too, must be taken into account in the case of Augustus. In the closing years of the Republic, candidates for office and men elected to office saw that one of the most effective ways of winning and holding their popularity was to give public entertainments, and they vied with one another in the costliness of the games and pageants which they gave the people. The well-known case of Caesar will be recalled, who, during his term as aedile, or commissioner of public works, bankrupted himself by his lavish expenditures on public improvements, and on the games, in which he introduced three hundred and twenty pairs of gladiators for the amusement of the people. In his book, "On the Offices," Cicero tells us of a thrifty rich man, named Mamercus, who aspired to public office, but avoided taking the aedileship, which stood in the regular sequence of minor offices, in order that he might escape the heavy outlay for public entertainment expected of the aedile. As a consequence, when later he came up for the consulship, the people punished him by defeating him at the polls. To check the growth of these methods of securing votes, Cicero, in his consulship, brought in a corrupt practices act, which forbade citizens to give gladiatorial exhibitions within two years of any election in which they were candidates. We may doubt if this measure was effective. The Roman was as clever as the American politician in accomplishing his purpose without going outside the law. Perhaps an incident in the life of Cicero's young friend, Curio, is a case in point. It was an old Roman custom to celebrate the ninth day after a burial as a solemn family festival, and some time in the second century before our era the practice grew up of giving gladiatorial contests on these occasions. The versatile Curio, following this practice, testified his respect for his father's memory by giving the people such elaborate games that he never escaped from the financial difficulties in which they involved him. However, this tribute of pious affection greatly enhanced his popularity, and perhaps did not expose him to the rigors of Cicero's law.