These gifts from generals, from distinguished citizens, and from candidates for office do not go far to prove a generous or philanthropic spirit on the part of the donors, but they show clearly enough that the practice of giving large sums of money to embellish the city, and to please the public, had grown up under the Republic, and that the people of Rome had come to regard it as the duty of their distinguished fellow citizens to beautify the city and minister to their needs and pleasures by generous private contributions.
All these gifts were for the city of Rome, and for the people of the city, not for the Empire, nor for Italy. This is characteristic of ancient generosity or philanthropy, that its recipients are commonly the people of a single town, usually the donor's native town. It is one of many indications of the fact that the Roman thought of his city as the state, and even under the Empire he rarely extended the scope of his benefactions beyond the walls of a particular town. The small cities and villages throughout the West reproduced the capital in miniature. Each was a little world in itself. Each of them not only had its forum, its temples, colonnades, baths, theatres, and arenas, but also developed a political and social organization like that of the city of Rome. It had its own local chief magistrates, distinguished by their official robes and insignia of office, and its senators, who enjoyed the privilege of occupying special seats in the theatre, and it was natural that the common people at Ostia, Ariminum, or Lugudunum, like those at Rome, should expect from those whom fortune had favored some return for the distinctions which they enjoyed. In this way the prosperous in each little town came to feel a sense of obligation to their native place, and this feeling of civic pride and responsibility was strengthened by the same spirit of rivalry between different villages that the Italian towns of the Middle Ages seem to have inherited from their ancestors, a spirit of rivalry which made each one eager to surpass the others in its beauty and attractiveness. Perhaps there have never been so many beautiful towns in any other period in history as there were in the Roman Empire, during the second century of our era, and their attractive features-their colonnades, temples, fountains, and works of art-were due in large measure to the generosity of private citizens. We can make this statement with considerable confidence, because these benefactions are recorded for us on innumerable tablets of stone and bronze, scattered throughout the Empire.
These contributions not only helped to meet the cost of building temples, colonnades, and other structures, but they were often intended to cover a part of the running expenses of the city. This is one of the novel features of Roman municipal life. We can understand the motives which would lead a citizen of New York or Boston to build a museum or an arch in his native city. Such a structure would serve as a monument to him; it would give distinction to the city, and it would give him and his fellow citizens aesthetic satisfaction tion But if a rich New Yorker should give a large sum to mend the pavement in Union Square or extend the sewer system on Canal Street, a judicial inquiry into his sanity would not be thought out of place. But the inscriptions show us that rich citizens throughout the Roman Empire frequently made large contributions for just such unromantic purposes. It is unfortunate that a record of the annual income and expenses of some Italian or Gallic town has not come down to us. It would be interesting, for instance, to compare the budget of Mantua or Ancona, in the first century of our era, with that of Princeton or Cambridge in the twentieth. But, although we rarely know the sums which were expended for particular purposes, a mere comparison of the objects for which they were spent is illuminating. The items in the ancient budget which find no place in our own, and vice versa, are significant of certain striking differences between ancient and modern municipal life.
Common to the ancient and the modern city are expenditures for the construction and maintenance of public buildings, sewers, aqueducts, and streets, but with these items the parallelism ends. The ancient objects of expenditure which find no place in the budget of an American town are the repair of the town walls, the maintenance of public worship, the support of the baths, the sale of grain at a low price, and the giving of games and theatrical performances. It is very clear that the ancient legislator made certain provisions for the physical and spiritual welfare of his fellow citizens which find little or no place in our municipal arrangements to-day. If, among the sums spent for the various objects mentioned above, we compare the amounts set apart for religion and for the baths, we may come to the conclusion that the Roman read the old saying, "Cleanliness is next to godliness" in the amended form "Cleanliness is next above godliness." No city in the Empire seems to have been too small or too poor to possess public baths, and how large an item of annual expense their care was is clear from the fact that an article of the Theodosian code provided that cities should spend at least one-third of their incomes on the heating of the baths and the repair of the walls. The great idle population of the city of Rome had to be provided with food at public expense. Otherwise riot and disorder would have followed, but in the towns the situation was not so threatening, and probably furnishing grain to the people did not constitute a regular item of expense. So far as public entertainments were concerned, the remains of theatres and amphitheatres in Pompeii, Fiesole, Aries, Orange, and at many other places to-day furnish us visible evidence of the large sums which ancient towns must have spent on plays and gladiatorial games. In the city of Rome in the fourth century, there were one hundred and seventy-five days on which performances were given in the theatres, arenas, and amphitheatres.
We have been looking at the items which were peculiar to the ancient budget. Those which are missing from it are still more indicative, if possible, of differences between Roman character and modes of life and those of to-day. Provision was rarely made for schools, museums, libraries, hospitals, almshouses, or for the lighting of streets. No salaries were paid to city officials; no expenditure was made for police or for protection against fire, and the slaves whom every town owned probably took care of the public buildings and kept the streets clean. The failure of the ancient city government to provide for educational and charitable institutions, means, as we shall see later, that in some cases these matters were neglected, that in others they were left to private enterprise. It appears strange that the admirable police and fire system which Augustus introduced into Rome was not adopted throughout the Empire, but that does not seem to have been the case, and life and property must have been exposed to great risks, especially on festival days and in the unlighted streets at night. The rich man could be protected by his bodyguard of clients, and have his way lighted at night by the torches which his slaves carried, but the little shopkeeper must have avoided the dark alleys or attached himself to the retinue of some powerful man. Some of us will recall in this connection the famous wall painting at Pompeii which depicts the riotous contest between the Pompeians and the people of the neighboring town of Nuceria, at the Pompeian gladiatorial games in 50 B.C., when stones were thrown and weapons freely used. What scenes of violence and disorder there must have been on such occasions as these, without systematic police surveillance, can be readily imagined.