Ancient Rome Glossary – Colleen McCullough
ABSOLVO The term employed by a jury when voting for the acquittal
of the accused. It was used in the courts, not in the Assemblies.
advocate
The term generally used by modern scholars to describe a
man active in the Roman law courts. "Lawyer" is considered too
modern, hence is not used in this book.
Aedile
There were four Roman magistrates called aediles; two were
called plebeian aediles, two were called curule aediles. Their duties
were confined to the city of Rome. The plebeian aediles were created
first (in 493 B.C.) to assist the tribunes of the plebs in their
duties, but, more particularly, to guard the rights of the plebs in
relation to their headquarters, the temple of Ceres in the Forum
Boarium. Elected by the Plebeian Assembly, the plebeian aediles soon
inherited supervision of the city's buildings as a whole, as well as
archival custody of laws (plebiscites) passed in the Plebeian
Assembly, together with any senatorial decrees (consulta) directing
the passage of plebiscites. In 367 B.C. two curule aediles were
created to give the patricians a share in custody of public buildings
and archives; they were elected by the Assembly of the People in
their tribes. Very soon, however, the curule aediles were as likely
to be plebeians as patricians by status. From the third century B.C.
onward, all four were responsible for the care of Rome's streets,
water supply, drains and sewers, traffic, public buildings, monuments
and facilities, markets, weights and measures (standard sets of these
were housed in the basement of the temple of Castor and Pollux),
games, and the public grain supply. They had the power to fine
citizens and noncitizens alike for infringements of any regulations
connected to any of the above, and deposited the monies in their
coffers to help fund the games. Aedile—plebeian or curule—was not a
part of the cursus honorum, but because of the games was a valuable
magistracy for a praetorian hopeful to hold.
Aeneas Prince of Dardania,
in the Troad. He was the son of
King Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans). When
Troy fell to the forces of Agamemnon, he fled the burning city with
his aged father perched on his shoulders and the Palladium under one
arm. After many adventures, he arrived in Latium and founded the race
from whom true Romans were descended. His son, Iulus, was the direct
ancestor of the Julian family; therefore the identity of Iulus's
mother was of some import. Virgil says lulus was actually Ascanius,
the son of Aeneas by his Trojan wife, Creusa, Aeneas having brought
the boy with him from Troy (Ilium to the Romans). On the other hand,
Livy says lulus was the son of Aeneas by his Latin wife, Lavinia.
What the Julian family of Caesar's day believed is not known. I shall
go with Livy, who seems on the whole a more reliable source than
Virgil.
Aesernia
A small city in northwestern Samnium. It was given the
Latin Rights in 263 B.C. to encourage its people to be loyal to Rome
rather than to Samnium, the traditional Italian enemy of Rome.
Africa
During the Roman Republic, the word "Africa" referred to
that part of the North African coast around Carthage—modern Tunisia.
Africa Province
That part of Africa which physically belonged to
Rome. In size it was quite small—basically, the out-thrust of land
which contained Carthage and Utica. This Roman territory was
surrounded by the much larger Numidia.
ager publicus
Land vested in Roman public ownership, most of it
acquired by right of conquest or taken off its original owners as a
punishment for disloyalty. This latter was particularly true of ager
publicus in the Italian peninsula. The censors leased it out on
behalf of the State in a manner favoring large estates. There was
Roman ager publicus in every overseas province, in Italian Gaul, and
in the Italian peninsula. The most famous and contentious of all the
many pieces of ager publicus was the ager Campanus,
extremely rich land which had once belonged to the city of Capua, and
was confiscated by Rome after several Capuan insurrections.
Agger
A part of the Servian Walls of Rome, the Agger protected the
city on its most vulnerable side, the Campus Esquilinus. The Agger
consisted of a double rampart bearing formidable fortifications.
Allies of Rome
Quite early in the history of the Roman Republic,
its magistrates began to issue the title "Friend and Ally of the
Roman People" to peoples and/or nations who had assisted Rome in an
hour of need; the most usual form of assistance was military. The
first Allies were located in the Italian peninsula, and as time went
on toward the later Republic, those Italian peoples not enfranchised
as full Roman citizens nor possessed of the Latin Rights were deemed
the Italian Allies. Rome assured them military protection and gave
them some other concessions, but in return they were expected to give
Rome troops whenever she asked, and to support those troops in the
field without financial assistance from Rome. Abroad, peoples and/or
nations began to earn the title too; for instance, the Aedui of
Gallia Comata and the Kingdom of Bithynia were formally deemed
Allies. The Italian nations were mostly called "the Allies," while
overseas nations were accorded the full title "Friend and Ally of the
Roman People."
Amor
Literally, "love." Because it is "Roma" spelled backward, the
Romans of the Republic commonly believed it was Rome's vital secret
name.
amphora
Plural, amphorae. A pottery vessel, bulbous in shape, the
amphora had a narrow neck and two handles connecting the shoulders
with the upper neck; its bottom was pointed or conical, rather than
flat, which meant it could not be stood upright on level ground. It
was used for the bulk transport (usually maritime) of wheat and other
grains, wine, oil, and other pourable substances. Its pointed bottom
enabled it to be fitted easily into the sawdust which filled the
ship's hold or the cart's interior, so that it was cushioned and
protected during its journey. This pointed bottom also enabled it to
be dragged across level .ground with considerable ease when being
loaded and unloaded. The customary sized amphora held about twentyfive liters (six American gallons), which made it too heavy and
awkward to be shouldered.
Anatolia
Roughly, modern Asian Turkey. It extended from the south
coast of the Euxine Sea (the Black Sea) to the north coast of the
Mediterranean, and from the Aegean Sea in the west to modern Russian
Armenia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria in the east. The Taurus and Antitaurus mountains made its interior and much of its coastline very
rugged, but it was then, as now, fertile and arable. The climate of
the interior was continental.
Antiochus
The generic name of many of the Kings of Syria and
other, smaller kingdoms in that part of the East.
Apulia
That part of southeastern Italy extending from Samnium in
the north to ancient Calabria in the south (the back of the Italian
leg). Fertile enough when there was water, the region has always
suffered greatly from a sparse rainfall. Its people, the Apuli, were
considered very poor and backward. The major towns were Luceria,
Venusia, Barium, and Canusium.
aquilifer
Presumably a creation of Gaius Marius's at the time he
gave the legions their silver eagles. The best man in the legion, the
aquilifer was chosen to carry the legion's silver eagle, and was
expected never to surrender it to the enemy. As a mark of his
distinction, he wore a wolf skin or a lion skin over his head and
shoulders, and all his decorations for valor.
Arausio, Battle of
On October 6, 105 B.C., the three Germanic
peoples (Cimbri, Teutones, and Tigurini/ Marcomanni/Cherusci) who had
been trying to migrate for fifteen years met Rome in battle outside
the town of Arausio, in the valley of the Rhodanus (the Rhone). Due
to a complete lack of co-operation between the two Roman commanders,
Gnaeus Mallius Maximus and Quintus Servilius Caepio, the Roman forces
were both separated from each other and hopelessly positioned; the
result was the worst defeat in the history of the Republic. Eighty
thousand Roman soldiers died.
Arpinum
A town in Latium not far from the border of Samnium, and
probably originally populated by Volsci. Together with Formiae Fundi,
it was the last Latin Rights community to receive the full Roman
citizenship (in 188 B.C.), but it did not enjoy proper municipal
status during the late Republic. Arpinum's chief claim to fame was as
the birthplace and homeland of two very distinguished men, Gaius
Marius and Marcus Tullius Cicero.
artillery
machines,
launching
grape, or
ballista,
Before the employment of gunpowder, these were military
usually spring-driven or spring-loaded, capable of
projectiles—boulders, rocks, stones, darts, canister,
bolts. Among the various kinds of Roman artillery were the
the catapultus, and the onager.
Arx
The Capitoline Mount of the city of Rome was divided into two
humps by a declivity called the Asylum; the Arx was the more northern
of the two humps, and contained the temple of Juno Moneta.
as
The smallest in value of the coins issued by Rome; ten of them
equaled one denarius. They were bronze. I have avoided all mention of
the as in this book because of (a) its relative unimportance, and (b)
its identical spelling to the English language adverb and/or
conjunction "as"— most confusing!
Asia Minor
Basically, modern Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and
Armenia. So little was known by the ancients about Arabia that its
inclusion in Asia Minor was ephemeral; the Black Sea and the Caucasus
formed the northern boundary of Asia Minor.
Asia Province
The Roman province left to Rome in the will of King
Attalus III of Pergamum. It consisted of the west coast and
hinterland of what is now Turkey, from the Troad and Mysia in the
north to the Cnidan peninsula in the south; thus it included Caria,
but not Lycia. Its capital in Republican times was Pergamum, but
Smyrna, Ephesus, and Halicarnassus rivaled the seat of the governor
in importance. The islands lying off its coast—Lesbos, Lemnos, Samos,
Chios, et cetera—were a part of the province. Its people were
sophisticated and highly commercial in outlook, and were the
descendants of successive waves of Greek colonization—Aeolian,
Dorian, Ionian. It was not centralized in the modern sense, but was
administered by Rome as a series of separate communities which were
largely self-governing and gave tribute to Rome.
Assembly
(comitia) Any gathering of the Roman People convoked to
deal with governmental, legislative, judicial, or electoral matters.
In the time of Marius and Sulla there were three true Assemblies—of
the Centuries, the Whole People, and the Plebs.
The Centuriate Assembly (comitia centuriata) marshaled the
People, patrician and plebeian, in their Classes, which were filled
by a means test and were economic in nature. As this was originally a
military assembly, each Class gathered in the form of Centuries
(which by the time of Marius and Sulla numbered far in excess of one
hundred men per century, as it had been decided to keep the number of
Centuries in each Class the same). The Centuriate Assembly met to
elect consuls, praetors, and (every five years) censors. It also met
to hear trials involving a charge of major treason, and could pass
laws. Because of the unwieldy nature of the Centuriate Assembly,
which had to meet outside the pomerium on the Campus Martius at a
place called the saepta, it was in normal times not convoked to pass
laws or hear trials.
The Assembly of the People (comitia populi tributa) allowed
the full participation of patricians, and was tribal in nature. It
was convoked in the thirty-five tribes into which all Roman citizens
were placed. When speaking of this Assembly throughout the book, I
have mostly chosen to call it the Whole People to avoid confusion. It
was called together by a consul or praetor, and elected the
quaestors, the curule aediles, and the tribunes of the soldiers. It
could formulate laws and conduct trials. The normal meeting place was
in the lower Forum Romanum, in the Well of the Comitia.
The Plebeian Assembly (comitia plebis tributa or concilium
plebis) did not allow the participation of patricians, and met in the
thirty-five tribes. The only magistrate empowered to convoke it was
the tribune of the plebs. It had the right to enact laws (strictly,
plebiscites) and conduct trials. Its members elected the plebeian
aediles and the tribunes of the plebs. The normal meeting place was
in the Well of the Comitia.
In no Roman Assembly could the vote of one individual be
credited directly to his wants; in the Centuriate Assembly his vote
was incorporated into the vote of his Century in his Class, his
Century's majority vote then being cast as a single vote; in the two
tribal Assemblies his vote was incorporated into the vote of his
tribe, the majority vote of the tribe then being cast as one single
vote.
atrium The main reception room of a Roman domus or private house; it
contained a rectangular opening in the roof (the compluvium), below
which was a pool (the impluvium). Originally the purpose of the pool
was to provide a reservoir of water for household use, but by the
late Republic the pool was usually purely ornamental.
Attalus III
The last King of Pergamum, and ruler of most of the
Aegean coast of western Anatolia as well as inland Phrygia. In 133
B.C. he died at a relatively early age, and without heirs closer than
a collection of cousins. His will bequeathed his kingdom to Rome,
much to the chagrin of the cousins, who promptly went to war against
Rome. The insurrection was put down by Manius Aquillius in 129 and
128 B.C., after which Aquillius settled to organize the bequest as
the Roman province of Asia. While going about this task, Aquillius
sold most of Phrygia to the fifth King Mithridates of Pontus for a
sum of gold which he put into his own purse. Discovered by those in
Rome, this deed of greed permanently crippled the reputation of the
family Aquillius.
Attic helmet
An ornate helmet worn by Roman officers above the
rank of centurion. It is the kind of helmet commonly worn by the
stars of Hollywood Roman epic movies—though I very much doubt that
any Attic helmet of Republican times was crested with ostrich
feathers! There were ostrich feathers available, but their employment
would have been deemed decadent, to say the least.
auctoritas
A very difficult Latin term to translate, as it meant
far more than the English word "authority" implies. It carried
nuances of pre-eminence, clout, leadership, public importance, and—
above all—the ability to influence events through sheer public
reputation. All the magistracies possessed auctoritas as a part of
their very nature, but auctoritas was not confined to those who held
magistracies; the Princeps Senatus, Pontifex Maximus, consulars, and
even some private individuals outside the Senate could also own
auctoritas. Where the term occurs in the book, I have left it
untranslated.
Augur
A priest whose duties concerned divination rather than
prognostication. He and his fellow augurs comprised the College of
Augurs, an official State body, and at the time of this book numbered
twelve, six patricians and six plebeians. Until 104 B.C., when Gnaeus
Domitius Ahenobarbus passed his lex Domitia de sacerdotiis, new
augurs had been co-opted by those already in the College; after that
law, augurs had to be elected by an Assembly of seventeen tribes
chosen by lot. The augur did not predict the future, nor did he
pursue his auguries at his own whim; he inspected the proper objects
or signs to ascertain whether or not the projected undertaking was
one having the approval of the gods, be the undertaking a meeting, a
war, a proposed new law, or any other State business, including
elections. There was a standard manual of interpretation to which the
augur referred; augurs "went by the book." The augur wore the toga
trabea (see that entry), and carried a curved staff called the
lituus.
auxiliary
A legion of non-citizens incorporated into a Roman army
was called an auxiliary legion; its soldiers were also called
auxiliaries, and the term extended to cavalry as well. In the time of
Marius and Sulla, most auxiliary infantry was Italian in origin,
whereas most auxiliary cavalry was Numidian, Gallic, or Thracian, all
lands where the soldiers habitually rode horses. The Roman soldier
(and the Italian soldier) was not enamored of horses.
barbarian
Derived from a Greek word having strong onomatopoeic
overtones; on first hearing these peoples speak, the Greeks thought
they sounded "bar-bar," like animals barking. The word "barbarian"
was used to describe races and nations deemed uncivilized, lacking in
any admirable or desirable culture. Gauls, Germans, Scythians,
Sarmatians, and Dacians were considered barbarian.
basilica
A large building devoted to public activities such as
courts of law, and also to commercial activities in shops and
offices. The basilica was two-storeyed and clerestory-lit, and
incorporated an arcade of shops under what we might call verandah
extensions along either side. During the Republic it was erected at
the expense of some civic-minded Roman nobleman, usually of consular
status, often censorial as well. The first basilica was built by Cato
the Censor on the Clivus Argentarius next door to the Senate House,
and was known as the Basilica Porcia; as well as accommodating
banking institutions, it was also the headquarters of the College of
Tribunes of the Plebs. At the time of this book, there also existed
the Basilica Aemilia, the Basilica Sempronia, and the Basilica
Opimia, all on the fringes of the lower Forum Romanum.
Bellona
The Roman goddess of war. Her temple lay outside the
pomerium or sacred boundary of the city on the Campus Martius, and
was vowed in 296 B.C. by the great Appius Claudius Caecus. A group of
special priests called fetiales conducted her rituals. A large vacant
piece of land lay in front of the temple of Bellona, and was known as
Enemy Territory.
Bithynia
A kingdom flanking the Propontis (the modern Sea of
Marmara) on its Asian side, extending east to Paphlagonia and
Galatia, south to Phrygia, and southwest to Mysia. It was fertile and
prosperous, and was ruled by a series of kings of Thracian origin—the
first two were named Prusias, the rest Nicomedes. The traditional
enemy of Bithynia was Pontus. From the time of Prusias II, Bithynia
enjoyed the status Friend and Ally of the Roman People.
boni
Literally, "the Good Men." First mentioned in a play by
Plautus called The Captives, the term came into political use during
the days of Gaius Gracchus. He used it to describe his followers—but
so also did his enemies Opimius and Drusus. It then passed gradually
into general use, indicating men of intensely conservative political
inclination; the "true" government of Rome in this book—that is, the
faction led by the consul Gnaeus Octavius Ruso—would have described
its members as boni.
Brennus
A king of the Gauls (or Celts) during the third century
B.C.. Leading a large confraternity of Celtic tribes, Brennus invaded
Macedonia and Thessaly in 279 B.C., turned the Greek defense at the
pass of Thermopylae and sacked Delphi, in which battle he was badly
wounded. He then penetrated into Epirus and sacked the enormously
rich oracular precinct of Zeus at Dodona; and went on to sack the
richest precinct in the world, that of Zeus at Olympia in the Greek
Peloponnese. Retreating before a determined Greek guerrilla
resistance, Brennus returned to Macedonia, where he died of his
wound. Without Brennus to hold them together, his Gauls were
rudderless. Some of them (the Tolistobogii, the Trocmi, and a segment
of the Volcae Tectosages) crossed the Hellespont into Asia Minor and
settled in a land thereafter called Galatia. Those Volcae Tectosages
who did not go to Asia Minor returned to their homeland around Tolosa
in southwestern Gaul; with them they carried the entire loot of
Brennus's campaign, holding it in trust against the return of the
rest of the tribes to Gaul. Apparently they melted the gold and
silver down (turning the silver into gigantic millstones) before
hiding it in various sacred lakes within the precinct of Herakles in
Tolosa. The gold amounted to fifteen thousand talents. See also Gold
of Tolosa.
Burdigala
Modern Bordeaux, in southwestern France. A great Gallic
oppidum (fortress) belonging to the Aquitani, it lay on the south
bank of the Garumna River (the modern Garonne) near its mouth. In 107
B.C. it was the scene of a debacle, when a combined force of Germans
and Aquitani annihilated the Roman army of Lucius Cassius Longinus,
consul (with Gaius Marius) in that year. Lucius Calpurnius Piso
Caesoninus was killed, as was Cassius himself. Only Gaius Popillius
Laenas and a handful of men survived.
Calabria Confusing
for those who know modern Italy better than they
do ancient Italy! Nowadays Calabria is the toe of the boot, but in
ancient times Calabria was the heel. Brundisium was its most
important city, followed by Tarentum. The region was not mightily
involved in the Marsic War, though its people, the Calabri, were
sympathetic to the Italian cause.
Campania
A fabulously rich and fertile basin, volcanic in origin
and soil, Campania lay between the Apennines of Samnium and the
Tuscan Sea, and extended from Tarracina in the north to a point well
south of the modern Bay of Naples. Watered by the Liris,
Volturnus/Calor, Clanius, and Sarnus rivers, it grew bigger, better,
and more of everything than any other region in Italy, even Italian
Gaul of the Padus. Colonized during the seventh century B.C. by the
Greeks, it fell under Etruscan domination, then affiliated itself to
the Samnites (of whom there was a large element in its population),
and eventually became subject to Rome. Because of the Greek and
Samnite population, it was always an area prone to insurrection, and
lost much of its best countryside to Rome as Roman ager publicus. The
towns of Capua, Teanum Sidicinum, Venafrum, Acerrae, Nola, and
Interamna were important inland centers, while the ports of Puteoli,
Neapolis, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Surrentum, Stabiae, and Salernum
constituted the best on Italy's west coast. Puteoli was the largest
and busiest port in all of Italy. The Viae Campana, Appia, and Latina
passed through it.
campus Plural, campi. A plain, or a flat expanse of ground.
Campus Esquilinus The area of flat ground outside the Servian
Walls and the double rampart of the Agger, between the Querquetulan
Gate and the Colline Gate. Here lay Rome's necropolis.
Campus Martius
Situated to the north and northwest of the
Servian Walls of Rome, the Campus Martius was bounded by the Capitol
to its south and the Pincian Hill on its east; the rest of it was
enclosed by a huge bend in the Tiber River. On the Campus Martius
armies awaiting their general's triumph were bivouacked, military
exercises and the training of the young went on, the stables and
exercise tracks for horses engaged in chariot racing were situated,
assemblies of the comitia centuriata took place, and market gardening
vied with public parklands. The Tiber swimming hole of the Trigarium
lay at the apex of the bend, and just to the north of that were
medicinal mineral hot springs called the Tarentum. The Via Lata (Via
Flaminia) crossed the Campus Martius on its way to the Mulvian
Bridge, and the Via Recta bisected it at right angles to the Via
Lata.
Campus Vaticanus
Situated on the opposite (north) bank of the
Tiber from the Campus Martius, the Campus Vaticanus was an area of
market gardening and had no importance in the Rome of Marius and
Sulla.
Cannae
An Apulian town on the Aufidius River in southeastern
Italy. Here in 216 B.C. , Hannibal and his Punic army (allied with
the Samnites) met a Roman army commanded by Lucius Aemilius Paullus
and Gaius Terentius Varro. The Roman army was annihilated; until the
Battle of Arausio in 106 B.C. , it ranked as Rome's worst military
disaster. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 men died. The survivors
were made to pass beneath the yoke (see yoke).
Capena Gate
Porta Capena. This was one of the two most strategic
gates in Rome's Servian Walls (the other was the Colline Gate). It
lay south of the Circus Maximus, and outside it was the common road
which branched into the Via Appia and the Via Latina about half a
mile from the gate itself.
capite censi
Literally, "Head Count." The capite censi were those
full Roman citizens too poor to belong to one of the five economic
classes, and so were unable to vote in the Centuriate Assembly at
all. As most capite censi were urban in origin as well as in
residence, they largely belonged to urban tribes, which numbered only
four out of the total thirty-five tribes; this meant they had little
influence in either of the tribal Assemblies, People or Plebs (see
also Head Count, proletarii).
Cappadocia
A kingdom located in central Anatolia (it is still
known today as Cappadocia). Lying at high altitude, the land was
created by the outpourings of many volcanos, the most notable of
which was Mount Argaeus; Cappadocia's only township, Eusebeia Mazaca,
lay on the lower flanks of this mighty cone. Bountifully watered and
rich of soil, Cappadocia was perpetually coveted by the more powerful
kings to its north (Pontus) and south (Syria). However, Cappadocia
maintained its own line of kings, who usually went by the title
Ariarathes. The people were akin to the people of Pontus. The templestate of Ma at Comana, rich enough to keep 6,000 temple slaves, was
reserved as a fief for the reigning king's brother, who functioned as
its high priest.
Capua
The most important inland town in Campania. A history of
broken pledges of loyalty to Rome led to Roman reprisals which
stripped Capua of its extensive and extremely valuable public lands;
these became the nucleus of the ager Campanus, and included, for
instance, the fabulous vineyards which produced Falernian wines. By
the time of Marius and Sulla, Capua's economic well-being depended
upon the many military training camps, gladiatorial schools, and
slave camps for bulk-lot prisoners that lay on the town's outskirts;
the people of Capua made their livings from supplying and servicing
these huge institutions.
Carinae
One of Rome's more exclusive addresses. The Carinae (which
incorporated the Fagutal) was the northern tip of the Oppian Mount on
its western side; it extended between the Velia and the Clivus
Pullius. Its outlook was southwestern, across the swamps of the Palus
Ceroliae toward the Aventine.
Carthage
Capital and chief center of the trading empire founded by
Phoenician colonists in central North Africa (modern Tunisia).
Situated on one of the finest harbors in the Mediterranean,
Carthage's port facilities were enhanced by massive man-made
improvements. After Scipio Aemilianus terminated the activities of
the Carthaginians in the Third Punic War, Carthage itself virtually
ceased to exist.
Caudine Forks
In 321 B.C. a Roman army was trapped in a gulch
known as the Caudine Forks, somewhere near the Samnite town of
Beneventum. It surrendered to the Samnite Gavius Pontius, who forced
its soldiers to pass beneath the yoke, a terrible disgrace.
Celtiberian
The name given to the members of that segment of the
Celtic race which crossed the Pyrenees into Spain and settled in its
central, northwestern, and northeastern regions. By the time of
Marius and Sulla the Celtiberians were so well ensconced that they
were generally regarded as indigenous to Spain.
Celts
More the modern than the ancient term for a barbarian race
which emerged from north-central Europe during the early centuries of
the first millennium B.C. From about 500 B.C. onward, the Celts
attempted to invade the lands of the European Mediterranean; in Spain
and Gaul they succeeded, whereas in Italy, Macedonia, and Greece they
failed. However, in Italian Gaul, Umbria, and Picenum in Italy (as
well as in Macedonia, Thessaly, Illyricum, and Moesia) they seeded
whole populations which gradually admixed with older local stock.
Racially the Celts were different from, yet akin to, the later
Germans; they considered themselves a discrete people, and had a more
complex religious culture than the Germans. Their languages were
similar in some ways to Latin. A Roman rarely if ever used the word
"Celt"; he said "Gaul."
censor
The censor was the most senior of all Roman magistrates,
though he lacked imperium and was not therefore escorted by lictors.
No man who had not already been consul could seek election as censor,
and only those consulars owning tremendous auctoritas and dignitas
normally bothered to stand. To be elected censor (by the Centuriate
Assembly) was a complete vindication of a man's political career, as
it told Rome he was one of the very top men. Two censors were elected
to serve together for a period of five years called the lustrum,
though the censors were active in their duties only for about the
first eighteen months. The censors inspected and regulated membership
in the Senate, the Ordo Equester (the knights), the holders of the
Public Horse (the 1,800 most senior knights), and conducted a general
census of Roman citizens throughout the Roman world. They also
applied the means test. State contracts and various public works and
buildings were in the domain of the censors.
census
Every five years the censors brought the roll of the
citizens of Rome up to date. The name of every Roman citizen male was
entered on these rolls, together with information about each man's
tribe, his economic class, his property and means, and his family.
Neither women nor children were formally registered as being Roman
citizens, though there are cases documented in the ancient sources in
which a woman was awarded the Roman citizenship in her own right. The
city of Rome's census was taken on the Campus Martius at a special
station erected for the purpose; those living elsewhere in Italy had
to report to the authorities at the nearest municipal registry, and
those living abroad to the provincial governor. There is some
evidence, however, that the censors of 97 B.C., Lucius Valerius
Flaccus and Marcus Antonius Orator, changed the manner by which
citizens living outside Rome but inside Italy were enrolled.
Centuriate Assembly See Assembly
centurion The regular officer of both
Roman citizen and auxiliary
legions. It is a mistake to equate him with the modern
noncommissioned officer; centurions were complete professionals
enjoying a status uncomplicated by our modern social distinctions. A
defeated Roman general hardly turned a hair if he lost military
tribunes, but tore his hair out in clumps if he lost centurions.
Centurion rank was graduated; the most junior centurio (plural,
centuriones) commanded a group of eighty soldiers and twenty
noncombatants called a century. In the Republican army as reorganized
by Gaius Marius, each cohort had six centurions, with the most senior
man—the pilus prior—commanding the senior century of his cohort as
well as commanding his entire cohort. The ten men commanding the ten
cohorts making up a legion were also ranked in seniority, with the
legion's most senior centurion, the primus pilus, answering only to
his legion's commander (either one of the elected tribunes of the
soldiers, or one of the general's legates). Promotion during
Republican times was up from the ranks.
chersonnese
The name the Greeks gave to a peninsula, though they
used it somewhat more flexibly than modern geographers employ the
term peninsula. Thus the Tauric Chersonnese, the Cimbrian
Chersonnese, the Thracian Chersonnese, the Cnidan Chersonnese, et
cetera.
Chios
A large island in the Aegean Sea, lying off the coast of Asia
Minor (the Roman Asia Province) near Smyrna. Chios was chiefly famous
for its wine, which had no peer. After an accident to his flagship
caused by a Chian ship, King Mithridates VI of Pontus ever after
harbored a huge grudge against Chios and Chians.
Cilicia
Cilicia was that part of southern Anatolia lying opposite
the Cleides peninsula of Cyprus and extending westward as far as the
further end of Cyprus, where it adjoined Pamphylia. Its eastern
border lay along the Amanus mountains, which separated it from Syria.
Western Cilicia was harsh, arid, and extremely mountainous, but
eastern Cilicia (known as Cilicia Pedia) was a large and fertile
plain watered by the Pyramus, the Saras and the Cydnus rivers. Its
capital was Tarsus, on the Cydnus. Modern scholars hold differing
opinions as to when Cilicia was formally made a province of Rome, but
there seems to me plenty of evidence to suggest that Marcus Antonius
Orator annexed it during his campaign against the pirates in 101 B.C.
Certainly Sulla was sent to govern Cilicia during the nineties, well
before the Marsic War.
Cimbri
A very large confraternity of Germanic tribes who lived in
the more northern half of the Cimbric Chersonnese (the modern Jutland
Peninsula) until about 120 B.C., when some natural disaster prompted
them to migrate. Together with their southern neighbors, the
Teutones, they began an epic trek to find a new homeland—a trek which
lasted twenty years, took them thousands of miles, and finally
brought them up against Rome—and Gaius Marius. They were virtually
annihilated at the battle of Vercellae in 101 B.C. citadel Properly,
a fortress atop a precipitous hill. Sometimes it lay within its own
walls within a larger, more open fortress, as was the case with the
Roman stronghold on the Janiculum.
citizenship
For the purposes of this book, the Roman citizenship.
Possession of it entitled a man to vote in his tribe and his class
(if he was economically qualified to belong to a class) in all Roman
elections. He could not be flogged, he was entitled to the Roman
trial process, and he had the right of appeal. At various times both
his parents had to be Roman citizens, at other times only his father
(hence the cognomen Hybrida); after the lex Minicia of 91 B.C., a
Roman male marrying a non-Roman woman would have had to acquire
conubium for his wife if the child was to be a Roman citizen. The
male citizen became liable for military service on his seventeenth
birthday, and had then to serve for ten campaigns or six years,
whichever came first. Before Gaius Marius's army reforms, a citizen
had to possess sufficient property to buy his own arms, armor, gear,
and provisions if he was to serve in the legions; after Gaius Marius,
legions contained both propertied men and men of the capite censi,
the Head Count.
citocacia A mild Latin profanity, meaning "stinkweed."
citrus wood The most prized cabinet wood of the Roman
world, seen
at its very best during the last century of the Republic. Citrus wood
was cut from vast galls on the root system of a cypresslike tree,
Callitris quadrivavis vent., which grew in the highlands of North
Africa all the way from the Oasis of Ammonium, and Cyrenaica, to the
far Atlas of Mauretania; it must be emphasized that the tree was no
relation of orange or lemon, despite the name of its timber.
Different trees produced different patterns in the grain, all of
which had names—tiger had a long and rippling grain, panther a spiral
grain, peacock had eyes like those in a peacock's tail, parsley a
ruffled grain, and so on. In Republican times it was cut as solid
wood rather than as a veneer (scarcity dictated veneer during the
Empire), and always mounted upon an ivory leg or legs, usually inlaid
with gold. Hence a special guild of tradesmen grew up, the citrarii
et eborarii, combining citrus wood joiners with ivory carvers. Most
citrus wood was reserved for making table-tops, where the beauty of
its grain could really be displayed, but it was also turned as bowls.
No tables have survived to modern times, but we do have a few bowls,
and can see that citrus wood was certainly the most beautiful timber
of all time.
classes
These were five in number, and represented the economic
divisions of property-owning or steady-income-earning Roman citizens.
The members of the First Class were the richest, the members of the
Fifth Class the poorest. The capite censi or Head Count did not have
class status, and so could not vote in the Centuriate Assembly.
client In
Latin, cliens. The term denoted a man of free or freed
status (he did not have to be a Roman citizen, however) who pledged
himself to a man he called his patron. In the most solemn and binding
way, the client undertook to serve the interests and obey the wishes
of his patron. In return he received certain favors—usually gifts of
money, or a job, or legal assistance. The freed slave was
automatically the client of his ex-master until discharged of this
obligation— if he ever was. A kind of honor system governed the
client's conduct in relation to his patron, and was remarkably
consistently adhered to. To be a client did not necessarily mean a
man could not be a patron; more that he could not be an ultimate
patron, as technically his own clients were also the clients of his
patron. During the Republic there were no formal laws concerning the
client-patron relationship because they were not necessary—no man,
client or patron, could hope to succeed in life were he known as
dishonorable in this vital function. However, there were laws
regulating the foreign client-patron relationship; foreign states or
client-kingdoms acknowledging Rome as patron were legally obliged to
find the ransom for any Roman citizen kidnapped in their territories,
a fact that pirates relied on heavily for an additional source of
income. Thus, not only individuals could become clients; whole towns
and countries often were.
client-king
A foreign monarch might pledge himself as a client in
the service of Rome as his patron, thereby entitling his kingdom to
be called Friend and Ally of the Roman People. Sometimes, however, a
foreign monarch pledged himself as the client of one Roman
individual.
clivus
A street on an incline—that is, a hilly street. Rome, a city
of hills, had many.
cognomen
Plural, cognomina. This was the last name of a Roman
male anxious to distinguish himself from all his fellows possessed of
an identical first and family name. In some families it became
necessary to have more than one cognomen: for example, Quintus
Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica; Quintus was his first name
(praenomen), Caecilius his family name (nomen), and Metellus Pius
Scipio Nasica were all cognomina. The cognomen usually pointed up
some physical characteristic or idiosyncrasy— jug ears, flat feet,
hump back—or else commemorated some great feat—as in the Caecilii
Metelli who were cognominated Dalmaticus, Balearicus, Numidicus,
these being countries each man had conquered. Many cognomina were
heavily sarcastic or extremely witty.
cohort
After the reforms Gaius Marius carried out upon the Roman
legion, the cohort became the tactical unit of the legion. It
comprised six centuries of troops; in normal circumstances, a legion
owned ten cohorts. When discussing troop movements, it was customary
to speak of tactical strength in terms of cohorts rather than
legions—thus, twenty-five cohorts rather than two and a half legions,
or five cohorts rather than half a legion.
college
A body or society of men having something in common. Thus,
Rome owned priestly colleges (the College of Pontifices), political
colleges (the College of Tribunes of the Plebs), religious colleges
(the College of Lictors), and work-related colleges (the Guild of
Undertakers). Certain groups of men from all walks of life, including
slaves, banded together in what were called Crossroads Colleges to
look after the city of Rome's crossroads and conduct the annual feast
of the crossroads, the Compitalia.
colonnade
A roofed walkway flanked by one outer row of columns
when attached to a building in the manner of a verandah, or two rows
of columns, one on either side, if freestanding.
comitia See
Comitia The
Assembly.
large round well in which meetings of the comitia were
held. It lay in the lower Forum Romanum adjacent to the steps of the
Senate House and the Basilica Aemilia, and was formed of a series of
tiers. When packed, perhaps three thousand men could be accommodated
in it. The rostra, or speakers' platform, was attached to its side.
CONDEMNO The
word employed by a jury when delivering a verdict
of "guilty." It was a term confined to the courts (see also DAMNO).
confarreatio
The oldest and the strictest of the three forms of
Roman marriage. By the time of Marius and Sulla, only patricians
still practised it—but by no means all patrician marriages were
confarreatio, as it was not mandatory. The confarreatio bride passed
from the hand of her father to the hand of her husband, thus
preventing her acquiring any measure of independence; this was one
reason why confarreatio was not a popular form of marriage, as the
two easier forms allowed a woman more control over her dowry and
business affairs. The other cause of its unpopularity lay in the
diffarreatio
extreme difficulty of dissolving it; divorce (
) was a
legally and religiously arduous business considered more trouble than
it was worth unless the circumstances left no other alternative.
Conscript Fathers
When it was established by the kings of Rome,
the Senate consisted of one hundred patricians titled patres—
"fathers." Then, after the Republic was established and plebeians
were also admitted to the Senate, and its membership had swelled to
three hundred, and the censors were given the duty of appointing new
senators, the word "conscript" came into use as well because the
censors conscripted these new members. By the time of Marius and
Sulla, the two terms had been run together and senators were
addressed in the House as Conscript Fathers.
consul
The consul was the most senior Roman magistrate owning
imperium, and the consulship (modern scholars do not refer to it as
"the consulate" because a consulate is a modern diplomatic
institution) was considered the top rung of the cursus honorum. Two
consuls were elected each year by the Centuriate Assembly, and served
for one year. The first day of the new consul's office was New Year's
Day, January 1. The senior of the two consuls—who had polled his
requisite number of centuries first—held the fasces for the month of
January, which meant he officiated while his junior colleague looked
on. Each consul was attended by twelve lictors, but only the lictors
of the consul officiating during the month (it was the junior
consul's turn in February, and they then alternated for the rest of
the year) carried the fasces on their shoulders. By the first century
B.C. consuls could be either patrician or plebeian, excepting only
that two patricians could not hold office together. The proper age
for a consul was forty-two, twelve years after entering the Senate at
thirty. A consul's imperium knew no bounds; it operated not only in
Rome, but throughout Italy and the overseas provinces as well, and
overrode the imperium of a proconsular governor. The consul could
command any army.
consular
The name given to a man who had been consul. He was held
in special esteem by the rest of the Senate, was asked to speak ahead
of the junior magistrates, and might at any time be sent to govern a
province should the Senate require the duty of him. He might also be
asked to take on other duties, like caring for the grain supply.
consultum
The proper term for a senatorial decree. It did not
have the force of law. In order to become law, a consultum had to be
presented by the Senate to any of the Assemblies, tribal or
centuriate, which then voted it into law—if the members of the
Assembly in question felt like voting it into law. However, many
senatorial consulta (plural) were never submitted to an Assembly, nor
voted into law, yet were accepted as law by all of Rome; such were
senatorial decisions about who was going to govern a province—the
declaration or pursuit of war—who has to command an army—and foreign
affairs.
contio
Plural, contiones. A preliminary meeting to discuss the
promulgation of a law or any other comitial business. All three
Assemblies were required to debate a measure in contio, which, though
no voting took place, was formally convoked by the magistrate so
empowered in the particular Assembly concerned.
contubernalis
A military cadet, a subaltern of lowest rank in the
hierarchy of Roman legion officers, but excluding the centurions—no
centurion was ever a cadet, he was an experienced soldier.
corona
A crown. The word was usually confined to military
decorations for the very highest valor. Those crowns mentioned in
this book are:
corona graminea
or obsidionalis The Grass Crown. Made of grass
(or sometimes a cereal like wheat, if the battle took place in a
field of grain) taken from the battlefield and awarded "on the spot,"
the Grass Crown was the rarest of all Roman military decorations. It
was given only to a man who had by personal efforts saved a whole
legion—or a whole army.
corona civica
The Civic Crown. It was made of ordinary oak leaves.
Awarded to a man who had saved the lives of fellow soldiers and held
the ground on which he did this for the rest of the duration of a
battle, it was not given unless the soldiers in question swore a
formal oath before their general that such were the circumstances.
Crater Bay
The name the Romans used when referring to what is
today called the Bay of Naples. Though the ancient sources assure us
that the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79 was the first ever known,
the name Crater Bay suggests that at some time during prehistory a
much larger eruption of a volcano had created this huge bay.
cuirass
The name for the armor which encased a man's upper body. It
consisted of two plates of bronze or steel or hardened leather, one
protecting the thorax and abdomen, the other his back from shoulders
to lumbar spine. The plates were held together by straps or ties at
the shoulders and along each side under the arms. Some cuirasses were
exquisitely tailored to the contours of the torso, whereas others
fitted all men of a certain size and physique. The men of highest
rank—especially generals—wore cuirasses tooled in high relief and
silver-plated (sometimes, though rarely, gold-plated). The general
and his legates also wore a thin red sash around the cuirass about
halfway between the nipples and the waist; this sash was ritually
knotted and looped.
Cumae
This town was the first Greek colony in Italy, established
early in the eighth century B.C. It lay on the Tuscan Sea side of
Cape Misenum just to the north of Crater Bay, and was a very
fashionable seaside resort for Republican Romans.
cunnus
A Latin obscenity of extremely offensive nature— "cunt." It
meant the female genitalia.
Cuppedenis
market This area lay behind the upper Forum Romanum on
its eastern side, between the Clivus Orbius and the edge of the
Fagutal/Carinae. It was devoted to luxury and specialty items such as
pepper, spices, incense, ointments and unguents and balms, and also
served as the flower markets, where a Roman could buy anything from a
bouquet to a garland to go round the neck or a wreath to go on the
head. Until sold to finance Sulla's campaign against King
Mithridates, the land belonged to the State.
Curia Hostilia
The Senate House. It was thought to have been built
by Tullus Hostilius, the shadowy third of Rome's kings, hence its
name ("meeting house of Hostilius").
cursus honorum
“The Way of Honor." If a man aspired to be
consul, he had to take certain steps, collectively called the cursus
honorum. First he was admitted to the Senate (in the time of Marius
and Sulla, he was appointed by the censors or was elected a tribune
of the plebs—the office of quaestor did not then automatically admit
a man to the Senate); he had to serve as a quaestor, either before
admission to the Senate of after it; a minimum of nine years after
entering the Senate he had to be elected a praetor; and finally, two
years after serving as a praetor, he could stand for the consulship.
The four steps—senator, quaestor, praetor, consul—constituted the
cursus honorum. All other magistracies, including the censorship,
were independent of the cursus honorum and did not constitute a part
of it.
curule chair
The sella curulis was the ivory chair reserved
exclusively for magistrates owning imperium—a curule aedile sat in
one, a plebeian aedile did not. In style, the curule chair was
beautifully carved from ivory, with curved legs crossing in a broad
X; it was equipped with low arms, but had no back.
custodes
These were the minor officials who took care of electoral
procedures—tally clerks, keepers of the ballot tablets, et cetera.
DAMNO This was the word used to deliver a verdict of condemnation
(that is, "guilty") in a trial conducted by one of the Assemblies. It
did not belong to the courts, which used CONDEMNO. The glossary entry
in my first Roman book was not informative because I hadn't tracked
the words down; when rereading Dr. L. R. Taylor's Roman Voting
Assemblies during the writing of The Grass Crown, I discovered the
information now tendered. Research never stops! Nor does one get
everything out of a valuable book on first reading.
Delphi
The great sanctuary of the god Apollo, lying in the lap of
Mount Parnassus, in central Greece. From very ancient times it was an
important center of worship, though not of Apollo until about the
seventh or sixth century B.C.. The shrine contained an omphalos or
navel stone (probably a meteorite), and Delphi itself was thought to
be the center of the earth. An oracle of awesome fame resided at
Delphi, its prophecies delivered by a crone in a state of ecstatic
frenzy; she was known as Pythia, or the Pythoness. Fabulously rich
due to the constant stream of costly gifts from grateful petitioners,
Delphi was sacked and plundered several times during antiquity (see
Brennus), but recovered quickly afterward, as the gifts never stopped
coming in.
demagogue
Originally a Greek concept, meaning a politician whose
chief appeal was to the crowds. The Roman demagogue preferred the
arena of the Comitia well to the Senate House, but it was no part of
his policy to "liberate the masses," nor on the whole were those who
listened to him composed of the very lowly. The term was employed by
ultra-conservative factions within the Senate to describe the more
radical tribunes of the plebs.
denarius
Plural, denarii. Save for a very rare issue or two of
gold coins, the denarius was the largest denomination of coin during
the Roman Republic. Of pure silver, it contained about 3.5 grams of
the metal, and was about the size of a dime—very small. There were
6,250 denarii in one silver talent.
diadem
A thick white ribbon about one inch (25 mm) wide, each end
embroidered, and often finished with a fringe. It was worn tied
around the head, either across the forehead or behind the hairline,
and was knotted at the back beneath the occiput; the ends trailed
down onto the shoulders. Originally a mark of Persian royalty, the
diadem became the symbol of the Hellenistic monarch after Alexander
the Great removed it from the tiara of the Persian kings as being a
more appropriately Greek understatement of kingship than either a
crown or a tiara. It could be worn only by a reigning sovereign but
was not confined to the male sex—women wore the diadem too.
dignitas
A concept peculiar to Rome, dignitas cannot be translated
to mean English "dignity." It was a man's personal share of public
standing in the community, and involved his moral and ethical worth,
his reputation, his entitlement to respect and proper treatment by
his peers and by the history books. Auctoritas was public, dignitas
personal, an accumulation of clout and standing stemming from a man's
own personal qualities and achievements. Of all the assets a Roman
nobleman possessed, dignitas was likely to be the one he was most
touchy about; to defend it, he might be prepared to go to war or into
exile, to commit suicide, or to execute his wife and son. I have
elected to leave the term in my text untranslated.
diverticulum
In the sense used in this book, a road connecting
the main arterial roads which radiated out from the gates of Rome—in
effect, a "ring road."
Dodona
A temple and precinct sacred to Zeus. Located among the
inland mountains of Epirus some ten miles to the south and west of
Lake Pamboris, it was the home of a very famous oracle situated in a
sacred oak tree which was also the home of doves. Like all the great
oracular shrines, Dodona was the recipient of many gifts, and was in
consequence extremely rich. It was sacked several times in antiquity:
by the Aetolians in 219 B.C., by the Roman Aemilius Paullus in 167
B:C., and by the Scordisci in 90 B.C. On each occasion, the temple
recovered quickly and accumulated more riches.
dominus
Literally, "lord." Domine, the vocative case, was used in
address. Domina meant "lady" and dominilla "little lady."
Ecastor!
The exclamation of surprise or amazement considered polite
and permissible for women to utter. Its root suggests it invoked
Castor.
Edepol! The
exclamation of surprise or amazement considered polite
and permissible for men to utter when in the company of women. Its
root suggests it invoked Pollux.
Elysian Fields
Republican Romans had no real belief in the intact
survival of the individual after death, though they did believe in an
underworld and in "shades," which latter were rather mindless and
characterless effigies of the dead. To both Greeks and Romans,
however, certain men were considered by the gods to have lived lives
of sufficient glory (rather than merit) to warrant their being
preserved after death in a place called Elysium, or the Elysian
Fields. Even so, these privileged shades were mere wraiths, and could
only come to re-experience human emotions and appetites after
drinking blood. The living human being requiring an audience with a
dweller in the Elysian Fields had to dig a pit on the border,
sacrifice his animal, and fill the pit with blood. After drinking,
the shade could talk.
emporium
This word had two meanings. It could denote a seaport
whose commercial activities were tied up in maritime trade, as in the
case of the island of Delos; or it could denote a large waterfront
building where importers and exporters had their offices.
epulones Some
of the religious holidays in the Republican year
were celebrated by a feast, or a feast was a part of the day's
festivities. The task of organizing these feasts was the
Epulones
responsibility of the College of
, a minor priestly
institution. If the feast involved only the Senate or a similarly
small number of men, catering for it was easy; but some feasts
involved the entire free population of Rome. Originally there had
been only three epulones, but by the time of Marius and Sulla, there
were eight or ten of them.
ergastula
Singular, ergastulum. These were locked barracks for
criminals or slaves.
Ergastula became infamous when large-scale pastoralists increased in
numbers from the time of the Brothers Gracchi onward; such land
leasers used chain-gang labor to run their latifundia (ranches) and
locked them into ergastula.
ethnarch
The Greek word for a city or town magistrate.
Etruria The Latin name for what had once been the kingdom of the
Etruscans. It incorporated the wide coastal plains west of the
Apennines, from the Tiber in the south to the Arnus in the north.
During the late Republic its most important towns were Veii, Cosa,
and Clusium. The Viae Aurelia, Clodia, and Cassia ran through it.
Euxine
Sea The modern Black Sea. It was extensively explored by
the Greeks during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., and several
colonies of Greek traders were established on its shores. Because of
the large number of mighty rivers which emptied into it, it was
always less salty than other seas, and the current through the
Thracian Bosporus and the Hellespont always flowed from the Euxine to
the Aegean—a help leaving, a hindrance entering. By far the most
powerful nation bordering it was Pontus; the Euxine shores were
subdued and conquered by the sixth King Mithridates of Pontus.
However, Bithynia controlled the Thracian Bosporus, the Propontis,
and the Hellespont, and so made a large income from levying duty and
passage fees upon ships passing through these bodies of water.
Bithynia's
ownership of the Euxine entrance undoubtedly accounted for the bitter
enmity between Bithynia and Pontus.
extortion See repetundae.
faction This
is the term usually applied to Republican Roman
political groups by modern scholars. These groups could in no way be
called political parties in the modern sense, as they were extremely
flexible, with a constantly changing membership. Rather than form
around an ideology, the Republican Roman faction formed around an
individual owning enormous auctoritas or dignitas. I have completely
avoided the terms "Optimate" and "Popularis" because I do not wish to
give any impression that political parties existed.
fasces
The fasces were bundles of birch rods ritually tied together
in a crisscross pattern by red leather thongs. Originally an emblem
of the Etruscan kings, they passed into the customs of the emerging
Rome, persisted in Roman public life throughout the Republic, and on
into the Empire. Carried by men called lictors, they preceded the
curule magistrate (and the propraetor and proconsul as well) as the
outward symbol of his imperium. Within the pomerium, only the rods
went into the bundles, to signify that the curule magistrate had only
the power to chastise; outside the pomerium axes were inserted into
the bundles, to signify that the curule magistrate also had the power
to execute. The number of fasces indicated the degree of imperium—a
dictator had twenty-four, a consul (and proconsul) twelve, a praetor
(and propraetor) six, and a curule aedile two.
fasti
This Latin word actually meant days on which business could be
transacted, but by the time of Marius and Sulla it had come to mean
several other things: the calendar, lists relating to holidays and
festivals, and the list of consuls (this last probably because
Republican Romans did not reckon their years by number as much as by
who had been consuls). The entry in the glossary to The First Man in
Rome contains a fuller explanation of the calendar than space permits
me here—under fasti, of course.
flamen
Plural, flamines. A priest of a very special kind. There
were fifteen flamines, three major and twelve minor. The three major
flamines were the flamen Dialis (priest of Jupiter Optimus Maximus),
the flamen Martialis (priest of Mars), and the flamen Quirinalis
(priest of Quirinus). Save for the flamen Dialis, no flamen seemed to
have very onerous duties, yet the three major priests at least
received their housing and living at the expense of the State. They
were probably Rome's most ancient pontifices.
Fortuna
The Roman goddess of fortune, and one of the most
fervently worshipped deities in the Roman pantheon. There were many
temples to Fortuna, each dedicated to the goddess in a different
guise or light. But the aspect of Fortuna who mattered most to
politicians and generals was Fortuna Huiusque Diei—"The Fortune of
This Present Day." Even men as formidably intelligent and able as
Gaius Marius, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and Gaius Julius Caesar the
Dictator believed in the machinations of Fortuna implicitly, and
courted her favor.
forum
An open-air meeting place for all kinds of business, public
and private. Some fora (plural) were devoted to meat, others to
vegetables, or fish, or grain, while others witnessed political
assemblies and the business of government. Even an army camp had its
forum, situated alongside the general's tent.
freedman
A manumitted slave. Though technically a free man (and,
if his former master was a Roman citizen, a Roman citizen himself),
the freedman remained in the patronage of his former master. At the
time of Marius and Sulla he had little chance to exercise his right
to vote in the tribal assemblies, as he belonged to one of two urban
tribes—Esquilina and Suburana. If he was of superior ability or
ruthlessness, he might, however, be able to vote in the classes of
the Centuriate Assembly once he acquired sufficient wealth; freedmen
capable of amassing a fortune usually bought their way into a rural
tribe and so possessed the complete franchise.
free man
A man born free and never sold into slavery (except as a
nexus or debt slave, which was rare among Roman citizens during the
time of Marius and Sulla, though still prevalent among the Italian
Allies).
Fregellae This
had been a Latin Rights community with an
unblemished record of loyalty to Rome; then in 125 B.C. it revolted
against Rome and was crushed by the praetor Lucius Opimius in
circumstances of singular cruelty. Destroyed completely, the town
never recovered. It was situated on the Via Latina and the Liris
River just across the border in Samnium.
Further Spain
Hispania Ulterior. This was the further of Rome's
two Spanish provinces—that is, it lay further away from Rome than the
other province, called Nearer Spain. In the time of Marius and Sulla
the border between Nearer and Further Spains was somewhat tenuous. By
and large, the Further province encompassed the entire basins of the
Baetis and Anas rivers, the ore-bearing mountains in which the Baetis
and the Anas rose, the Atlantic littoral from the Pillars of Hercules
to Olisippo at the mouth of the Tagus, and the Mediterranean littoral
from the Pillars to the port of Abdera. The largest city by far was
Gades, but the seat of the governor was Corduba. Strabo calls it the
richest growing land in the world.
Gallia Comata
Long-haired Gaul. Having excluded the Roman
province of Gaul-across-the-Alps, Gallia Comata incorporated modern
France and Belgium, together with that part of Holland south of the
Rhine. The Rhine throughout its length formed the border between Gaul
and Germania. The inhabitants of all areas away from the Rhine were
Druidical Celts; close to the Rhine the strains were mixed due to
successive invasions of Germans. Long-haired Gaul was so called
because its peoples wore their hair uncut.
Ludi
games In Latin, They were a Roman institution and pastime
which went back at least as far as the very early Republic, and
probably a lot further. At first they were celebrated only when a
general triumphed, but in 336 B.C., the ludi Romani became an annual
event held in honor of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, whose feast day
occurred on September 13. At first the ludi Romani were over in a
single day, but as the Republic aged they increased in length; at the
time of Marius and Sulla they went on for ten days. Though there were
a few rather half-hearted boxing and wrestling bouts, Roman games
never possessed the athletic nature of Greek games. At first the
games consisted mostly of chariot races, then gradually came to
incorporate animal hunts, and plays performed in specially erected
theaters. On the first day of every games, there was a spectacular
religious procession through the Circus, after which came a chariot
race or two, and then the boxing and wrestling, limited to this first
day. The succeeding days were taken up with plays in the theater;
tragedies were far less popular than comedies, and by the time of
Marius and Sulla mimes were most popular of all. Then as the games
drew to a close, chariot racing reigned supreme, with wild beast
hunts to vary the program. Gladiatorial combats did not form a part
of Republican games (they were put on by private individuals, usually
as part of a funeral, in the Forum Romanum rather than in the
Circus). The games were put on at the expense of the State, though
men ambitious to make a name for themselves dug deep into their
purses when serving as aediles to make "their" games more spectacular
than the State allocation of funds permitted. Most of the big games
were held in the Circus Maximus, some of the smaller ones in the
Circus Flaminius. Free Roman citizen men and women could attend
(there was no admission charge), with women segregated in the theater
but not in the Circus; neither slaves nor freedmen were allowed
admission, probably because even the Circus Maximus, which held
perhaps 150,000 people, was not large enough to contain freedmen as
well as free men.
Gaul-across-the-Alps Gallia Transalpina.
I have preferred to
endow Gallia Transalpina with a more pedestrian name because of the
hideous confusion nonclassical readers would experience if they had
to deal with Cis and Trans. Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus won the Roman
Gallic province for Rome just before 120 B.C. to ensure that Rome
would have a safe land route for her armies marching between Italy
and Spain. The province consisted of a coastal strip all the way from
Liguria to the Pyrenees, with two inland incursions—one to Tolosa in
Aquitania, the other up the valley of the Rhodanus as far as the
trading post of Lugdunum (Lyon).
gens Plural,
gentes.
A Roman clan whose members all owned the same nomen or
family name, also called the gentilicial name. Julius, Domitius,
Cornelius, Aemilius, Servilius, Livius, Porcius, Junius and Licinius
were all gentilicial names, for example. All the genuine members of
the same gens (that is, excluding freed slaves who adopted their
masters' names) could trace their line back to a common ancestor. The
terms gens was feminine gender, hence gens Julia, gens Cornelia, gens
Servilia, and so forth.
gig
A two-wheeled vehicle drawn by either two or four animals, more
usually mules than horses. The gig was very lightly and flexibly
built within the limitations of ancient vehicles—springs and shock
absorbers did not exist—and was the vehicle of choice for a Roman in
a hurry because it was easy for the animals to draw, therefore
speedy. However, it was open to the elements. In Latin it was cisia.
The two-wheeled closed-in carriage, a heavier and slower vehicle, was
called the carpentum.
gladiator
A soldier of the sawdust, a professional warrior who
performed his trade before an audience as a form of entertainment. An
inheritance from the Etruscans, he always flourished throughout
Italy, including Rome. During the Republic he was an honorable as
well as an heroic figure, was well cared for and free to come and go.
His origins were several: he might be a deserter from the legions, a
condemned criminal, a slave, or a free man who voluntarily signed
himself up. In Republican times he served for perhaps four to six
years, and on an average fought perhaps five times in any one year;
it was rare for him to die, and the Empire’s "thumbs-up, thumbs-down"
verdict was still far in the future. When he retired he was prone to
hire himself out as a bodyguard or bouncer. To own a gladiatorial
school was considered a smart investment for a Roman businessman.
Gold of Tolosa
Perhaps several years after 278 B.C., a segment of
the tribe Volcae Tectosages returned from Macedonia to their homeland
around Aquitanian Tolosa (modern Toulouse) bearing the accumulated
spoils from many sacked temples (see Brennus). These were melted down
and stored in the artificial lakes which dotted the precincts of
Tolosa's temples; the gold was left lying undisturbed beneath the
water, whereas the silver was regularly hauled out—it had been formed
into gigantic millstones which were used to grind the wheat. In 106
B.C. the consul Quintus Servilius Caepio was ordered during his
consulship to make war against migrating Germans who had taken up
residence around Tolosa. When he arrived in the area he found the
Germans gone, for they had quarreled with their hosts, the Volcae
Tectosages, and been ordered away. Instead of fighting a battle,
Caepio the Consul found a vast amount of gold and silver in the
sacred lakes of Tolosa. The silver amounted to 10,000 talents (250
imperial tons) including the millstones, and the gold to 15,000
talents (370 imperial tons). The silver was transported to the port
of Narbo and shipped to Rome, whereupon the wagons returned to Tolosa
and were loaded with the gold; the wagon train was escorted by one
cohort of Roman legionaries, some 520 men. Near the fortress of
Carcasso the wagon train of gold was attacked by brigands, the
soldier escort was slaughtered, and the wagon train disappeared,
together with its precious cargo. It was never seen again.
At the time no suspicion attached to Caepio the Consul, but
after the odium he incurred over his conduct at the battle of Arausio
a year later, it began to be rumored that Caepio the Consul had
organized the attack on the wagon train and deposited the gold in
Smyrna in his own name. Though he was never tried for the Great Wagon
Train Robbery, he was tried for the loss of his army, convicted, and
sent into exile. He chose to spend his exile in Smyrna, where he died
in 100 B.C. The story of the Gold of Tolosa is told in the ancient
sources, which do not state categorically that Caepio the Consul
stole it. However, it seems logical. And there is no doubt that the
Servilii Caepiones who succeeded Caepio the Consul down to the time
of Brutus (the last heir) were fabulously wealthy. Nor is there much
doubt that most of Rome thought Caepio the Consul responsible for the
disappearance of more gold than Rome had in the Treasury.
Good Men See boni.
governor A convenient
English word to describe the consul or
praetor, proconsul or propraetor, who—usually for the space of one
year—ruled a Roman province in the name of the Senate and People of
Rome. The degree of imperium the governor owned varied, as did the
extent of his commission. However, no matter what his imperium, while
in his province he was virtual king of it. He was responsibly for its
defense, administration, the gathering of its taxes and tithes, and
all decisions pertaining to it. Provinces notoriously difficult to
govern were generally given to consuls, peaceful backwaters to
praetors.
The Gracchi
More generally known as the Brothers Gracchi.
Cornelia, the daughter of Scipio Africanus and Aemilia Paulla, was
married when eighteen years old to the forty-five-year-old Tiberius
Sempronius Gracchus; the year was about 172 B.C., and Scipio
Africanus had been dead for twelve years. Tiberius Sempronius
Gracchus was consul in 177 B.C., censor in 169 B.C., and consul a
second time in 163 B.C. By the time he died in 154 B.C. he was the
father of twelve children. However, they were a universally sickly
brood; only three of them did Cornelia manage to raise to adulthood,
despite assiduous care. The oldest of these three was a girl,
Sempronia, who was married as soon as she was of age to her cousin
Scipio Aemilianus. The two younger children were boys. Tiberius was
born in 163 B.C., his brother Gaius not until the year of his
father's death, 154 B.C. Thus both boys owed their upbringing to
their mother, who by all accounts did a superlative job.
Both the Brothers Gracchi served under their mother's first
cousin (and their own brother-in-law) Scipio Aemilianus—Tiberius
during the Third Punic War, Gaius at Numantia—they were conspicuously
brave. In 137 B.C. Tiberius was sent as quaestor to Nearer Spain,
where he single-handedly negotiated a treaty to extricate the
defeated Hostilius Mancinus from Numantia, thus saving Mancinus's
army from annihilation; however, Scipio Aemilianus considered
Tiberius's action disgraceful, and managed to persuade the Senate not
to ratify the treaty. Tiberius never forgave his cousin and brotherin-law.
In 133 B.C. Tiberius was elected a tribune of the plebs and
set out to right the wrongs the State was perpetrating in its leasing
of the ager publicus. Against furious opposition, he passed an
agrarian law which limited the amount of public land any one man
might lease or own to 500 iugera (with an extra 250 iugera per son),
and set up a commission to distribute the surplus land this limit
produced among the civilian poor of Rome. His aim was not only to rid
Rome of some of her less useful citizens, but also to ensure that
future generations would be in a position to give Rome sons qualified
at the means test to serve in the army. When the Senate chose to
filibuster, Tiberius took his bill straight to the Plebeian Assembly—
and stirred up a hornets' nest thereby, as this move ran counter to
all established practice. One of his fellow tribunes of the plebs,
his relative Marcus Octavius, vetoed the bill in the Plebeian
Assembly, and was illegally deposed from office—yet another enormous
offense against the mos maiorum (that is, established custom and
practice). The legality of these ploys mattered less to Tiberius's
opponents than did the fact that they contravened established
practice, however unwritten that. established practice might be.
When Attalus III of Pergamum died that year and was discovered
to have bequeathed his kingdom to Rome, Tiberius ignored the Senate's
right to decide what ought to be done with this bequest, and
legislated to have the lands used to resettle more of Rome's poor.
Opposition in Senate and Comitia hardened day by day.
Then when 133 B.C. drew to a close without Tiberius's seeing a
successful conclusion to his program, he flouted another established
practice—the one which said a man might be a tribune of the plebs
only once. Tiberius Gracchus ran for a second term. In a
confrontation on the Capitol between his own faction and an ultraconservative faction led by his cousin Scipio Nasica, Tiberius was
clubbed to death, as were some of his followers. His cousin Scipio
Aemilianus—though not yet returned from Numantia when this happened—
publicly condoned the murder, alleging that Tiberius had wanted to
make himself King of Rome.
Turmoil died down until ten years later, when Tiberius's
little brother Gaius was elected a tribune of the plebs in 123 B.C.
Gaius Sempronius Gracchus was the same kind of man as his elder
brother, but he had learned from Tiberius's mistakes, and was besides
the more able of the two. His reforms were far wider; they embraced
not only agrarian laws, but also laws to provide very cheap grain for
the urban lowly, to regulate service in the army, to found Roman
citizen colonies abroad, to initiate public works throughout Italy,
to remove the extortion court from the Senate and give it to the
knights, to farm the taxes of Asia Province by public contracts let
by the censors, and to give the full Roman citizenship to all those
having the Latin Rights, and the Latin Rights to every Italian. His
program was nowhere near completed when his term as a tribune of the
plebs came to an end, so Gaius did the impossible—he ran for a second
term, and got in. Amid mounting fury and obdurate enmity, he battled
on to achieve his program of reform, which was still not completed
when his second term expired. He stood a third time for the tribunate
of the plebs. This time he was defeated, as was his friend and close
colleague, Marcus Fulvius Flaccus.
When 121 B.C. dawned, Gaius saw his laws and policies attacked
at once by the consul Lucius Opimius and the ex-tribune of the plebs
Marcus Livius Drusus. Desperate to prevent everything he had done
being torn down again, Gaius Sempronius Gracchus resorted to
violence. The Senate responded by passing its first-ever "ultimate
decree" to stop the escalating Forum war; Fulvius Flaccus and two of
his sons were murdered and the fleeing Gaius Gracchus committed
suicide in the Grove of Furrina on the flanks of the Janiculan hill.
Roman politics could never be the same; the aged citadel of the mos
maiorum was now irreparably breached.
The same thread of tragedy wove through the personal lives of
the Brothers Gracchi also. Tiberius married a Claudia, the daughter
of Appius Claudius Pulcher, consul in 143 B.C., an inveterate enemy
of Scipio Aemilianus and as idiosyncratic as most Claudius-Pulcher
men tended to be. There were three sons of the marriage between
Tiberius and Claudia, none of whom lived to achieve a public career.
Gaius Gracchus also married the daughter of one of his stoutest
supporters—Licinia, daughter of Publius Licinius Crassus Mucianus.
They had one child only, a daughter, Sempronia, who married a Fulvius
Flaccus Bambalio—she produced a daughter, Fulvia, who became in turn
the wife of Publius Clodius Pulcher, Gaius Scribonius Curio, and Mark
Antony.
grammaticus
Not a teacher of grammar! He taught the basic arts
of rhetoric—public speaking (see rhetoric).
Greece
By the beginning of the first century B.C. Greece had been
stripped of the territories of Macedonia and Epirus. It comprised
Thessaly, Dolopia, Malis, Euboeia, Ocris, Phocis, Locris, Aetolia,
Acarnania, Boeotia, Attica, Corinth, and the various states of the
Peloponnese. Things Greek had fallen into almost complete decline;
many of Greece's regions were bare of people, their towns ghost,
their coffers empty. Only places like Athens continued in some way to
thrive. Centuries of war—with foreign invaders, at the whim of wouldbe conquerors, and—most often of all—between Greek states, had
impoverished the country and halved its population, many of whom (if
fortunate enough to possess a good trade or education) voluntarily
sold themselves into slavery.
Hannibal
The Carthaginian prince who led his country in the
second of its three wars against Rome. Born in 247 B.C. , the son of
Hamilcar, Hannibal was taught to soldier in Spain as a mere child; he
spent his youth in Spain, where his father was the Carthaginian
governor. In 218 B.C. Hannibal invaded Italy, a shock tactic which
confounded Rome; his crossing of the Alps (complete with elephants)
through the Montgenèvre Pass was brilliantly done. For sixteen years
he roamed at will through Italian Gaul and Italy, defeating Roman
armies at Trebia, Trasimene, and finally Cannae. But Quintus Fabius
Maximus Verrucosis Cunctator evolved a strategy which eventually wore
Hannibal out; relentlessly he shadowed the Carthaginian army with an
army of his own, yet never offered battle nor allowed his men to be
trapped into battle—the so-called “Fabian tactics.'' Because Fabius
Maximus was always in his vicinity somewhere, Hannibal never quite
got up the courage to attack the city of Rome herself. Then his
allies among the Italians began to flag; after his hold on Campania
was broken, Fabius Maximus forced Hannibal further and further south
in Italy. The Carthaginian lost the (verbal) battle for Tarentum at
about the same time as his younger brother, Hasdrubal, was defeated
at the Metaurus River in Umbria. Penned up in Bruttium, the very toe
of Italy, he evacuated his undefeated army back to Carthage in 203
B.C. At Zama he was beaten by Scipio Africanus, after which, as the
Head of State, he intrigued with Antiochus the Great of Syria against
Rome. Roman pressure forced him to flee from Carthage and seek asylum
with Antiochus in Syria; after Rome subdued the King, Hannibal had to
move on. He is reputed to have wandered to Armenia, where he helped
King Artaxias design and build his capital, Artaxata. So oriental a
court could not please; Hannibal journeyed west across Anatolia and
fetched up with King Prusias in Bithynia. Then in 182 B.C., Rome
demanded that Prusias hand the Carthaginian over. Rather than fall
into Roman hands, Hannibal committed suicide. An unrepentant enemy of
Rome, he was always admired and respected by Rome.
"hay on his horn"
Ancient oxen were endowed with most formidable
horns, and not all ancient oxen were placid, despite their castrated
state. A beast which gored was tagged in warning; hay was wrapped
around the horn it gored with, or around both horns if it gored with
both. Pedestrians scattered wildly on seeing an ox tagged in this
manner. The saying "hay on his horn" came to be applied to a very
large, good-natured, placid man after it was discovered that this
same man could turn like lightning and strike with the ruthlessness
of a born killer.
Head Count
This is the term I have used throughout the book to
describe the lowliest of Roman citizens—those who were too poor to
belong to one of the five economic Classes. All the censors did was
to take a "head count" of them. I have preferred Head Count to "the
proletariat" or "the masses" because of our modern post-Marxist
attitudes— attitudes entirely misleading in the ancient context (see
also capite censi and proletarii).
Hellenic
The term used to describe Greek culture outside Greece
after Alexander the Great introduced a Greek element into the courts
and kingdoms of Mediterranean and Asian rulers.
Herakles
The Greek form. In Latin, Hercules. A mortal man (though
a son of Zeus), his sheer strength, indomitability and perseverance
in adversity immortalized him for all time. After he died inside the
poisoned shirt, Zeus also immortalized him. However, it was
undoubtedly his human qualities which made him such an attractive
object of worship; he held sway from one end of the Mediterranean to
the other. His cult was exclusively male, and he was regarded as the
embodiment of all traditional male virtues. His was the statue
dressed in the raiment of the triumphing general. In Rome, he was
also a god of merchant trading, particularly for vendors of olive
oil. Some men thought themselves his descendants; this was true of
Mithridates and the Roman Antonii.
Hyperboreans
Literally, the people beyond the home of Boreas,
the North Wind. They were mythical, said to worship only the god
Apollo, and to live an idyllic existence. The Land of the
Hyperboreans was, however, definitely thought by the ancients to
exist somewhere in the far north. Ilium The name the Romans gave to
the city of Troy.
imago
Plural, imagines. This was the beautifully painted and
bewigged, lifelike mask of a Roman family's consular (or perhaps also
praetorian) ancestor. It was made out of beeswax and kept in a dustfree cupboard shaped like a miniature temple. The mask and its
cupboard were the objects of enormous reverence. When a man of the
family died, an actor was hired to don the mask and wig and
impersonate the dead ancestor in the funeral procession. If a man
became consul, his mask was added to the family collection. From time
to time a man who was not consul did something so remarkable it was
considered he deserved an imago.
imperator
Literally, the commander-in-chief or the general of a
Roman army. However, the term gradually came to be given only to a
general who won a great victory; his troops hailed him imperator on
the field. In order to gain permission from the Senate to celebrate a
triumph, a general had to prove that his men had indeed hailed him as
imperator on the field. Imperator is the root of the word "emperor."
imperium
Imperium was the degree of authority vested in a curule
magistrate or promagistrate. Imperium meant that a man owned the
authority of his office, and could not be gainsaid (provided he was
acting within the limits of his particular level of imperium and
within the laws governing his conduct). It was conferred by a lex
Curiata, and lasted for one year only; extensions had to be ratified
by Senate and/or People in the case of promagistrates who had not
completed their original commissions in the space of one year.
Lictors bearing fasces indicated that a man possessed imperium, the
higher the number, the higher the imperium (see also fasces; lictor;
magistrate),
insula
Plural, insulae. Literally, "island." Because it was usually
surrounded on all sides by streets or lanes or alleys, an apartment
building became known as an insula. Roman insulae were very tall (up
to one hundred feet—thirty meters—in height), and most were large
enough to warrant the incorporation of an internal light-well; many
were large enough to contain more than one internal light-well. Then,
as now, Rome was a city of apartment dwellers. This in itself is a
strong clue to the answer to the vexed question— how many people
lived in Rome? We know the dimensions of the city within the Servian
Walls: one-plus kilometers in width, two-plus kilometers in length.
That meant the population of Rome at the time of Marius and Sulla had
to have been at least one million, probably more. Otherwise the
insulae would have been half empty and the city smothered in parks.
Rome teemed with people, its insulae were multitudinous. Two million
(including slaves) might be closer to the truth of the matter.
Interrex
The word means "between the kings." It dates back to the
kings of Rome, when the patrician Senate appointed one of its members
to act after the death of one king and before the accession of a new
king. After the establishment of the Republic the practice survived
in cases where, due to death or other disaster, no consuls were left
in office, and no elections had yet been held. The members of the
Senate were divided into decuries of ten men, each decury being
headed by a patrician senator; this was always so. But while Rome had
no consuls, an interrex was chosen from among the patrician heads of
the senatorial decuries. He could serve for five days only, then was
succeeded by another patrician head of a decury; this went on until
elections could be held and proper consuls take office. While in
office the interrex was endowed with a full consular imperium, had
the full complement of twelve lictors, and could perform all the
functions of the consul. No man could be an interrex unless he was
the patrician head of a senatorial decury. The first in a series of
interreges (plural) was not allowed to hold consular elections.
Italia
For the purposes of this book, the word has two meanings.
First of all, it refers to all of ancient peninsular Italy south of
the Arnus and Rubico rivers. Secondly, it is used to refer to the
rebel Italian nations which rose against Rome in 91 B.C. and fought
the Marsic (later known as the Social) War.
Italian Allies
The peoples, tribes, or nations (they are variously
described as all three) who lived in the Italian peninsula without
enjoying either the full Roman citizenship or the Latin Rights were
known as the Italian Allies. In return for military protection and in
the interests of peaceful co-existence, they were required by Rome to
furnish properly armed soldiers for the armies of Rome, and to pay
for the upkeep of these soldiers. The Italian Allies also bore the
brunt of general taxation within Italy at the time of Marius and
Sulla, and in many instances had been obliged to yield part of their
lands to swell the Roman ager publicus. Many of them had either risen
against Rome (like the Samnites) or sided with Hannibal and others
against Rome (like parts of Campania). To some extent, there was
always some movement among the Italian Allies to throw off the Roman
yoke, or to demand that Rome accord them the full citizenship; but
until the last century of the Republic, Rome was sensitive enough to
act before the grumbling grew too serious. After the joint
enfranchisement of Formiae Fundi and Arpinum in 188 B.C., no more
Italian Allied communities were rewarded with the citizenship or even
the Latin Rights. The final straw which turned Italian Allied
discontent into open revolt was the lex Licinia Mucia of 95 B.C.; at
the end of 91 B.C. war broke out. The regions of Italy which remained
loyal to Rome were: Etruria, Umbria, Northern Picenum, Northern
Campania, Latium, the Sabine country.
The nations which rose up against Rome were: Marsi (after whom
the war was named, the Marsic War), Samnites, Frentani, Marrucini,
Picentes south of the Flosis River, Paeligni, Vestini, Hirpini, all
of whom rose up together, and were soon joined by: Lucani, Apuli,
Venusini.
The two regions in the extreme south, Bruttium and Calabria,
were sympathetic to the Italian cause, but took little part in
hostilities. Quintus Poppaedius Silo of the Marsi and Gaius Papius
Mutilus of the Samnites were the heads of the Italian Allied
government.
Italian Gaul Gallia Cisalpina—Gaul-on-this-side-of-the-Alps. In the
interests of simplicity, I have elected to call it Italian Gaul. It
incorporated all the lands north of the Arnus-Rubico border on the
Italian side of the formidable semicircle of alps which cut Italy off
from the rest of Europe. It was bisected from west to east by the
Padus River (the modem Po). South of the river the people and towns
were heavily Romanized, many of them possessing the Latin Rights.
North of the river the peoples and towns were more Celtic than Roman;
Latin was at best a second language, if spoken at all. The lex
Pompeia promulgated by Pompey Strabo in 89 B.C. gave the full Roman
citizenship to all the Latin Rights communities south of the Padus,
and gave the Latin Rights to the towns of Aquileia, Patavium, and
Mediolanum to the north of the Padus. Politically Italian Gaul dwelt
in a kind of limbo at the time of Marius and Sulla, for it had
neither the status of a true province nor was it a part of Italia.
The Marsic (Social) War saw for the first time the men of Italian
Gaul drafted into Rome's armies—as auxiliaries before the lex
Pompeia, as full Roman legions after that.
Italica
The capital of the new nation of Italia as dreamed of by the
insurgents of the Marsic (Social) War. It was actually the city of
Corfinium, and enjoyed the name Italica only while the war went on.
iugera
Singular, iugerum. The Roman unit of land measurement. In
modern terms one iugerum was 0.623 (or five eighths) of an acre, or
0.252 (one quarter) of a hectare. The modern user of imperial measure
will get close enough in acres by dividing the iugera in two; in
metric measure, to divide by four will be very close in hectares.
ius Latii See Latin Rights.
Janiculum The Janiculan hill
consisted of the heights behind the
northwest bank of the Tiber, opposite the city of Rome. During the
Republic-there was a defensive fortress upon it; this was still kept
up and was ready to be garrisoned during the time of Marius and
Sulla. A flagpole stood atop the citadel inside the stronghold; if
the red flag flying from it was pulled down, it was a signal that
Rome lay under threat of attack.
Jugurtha
King of Numidia from 118 B.C. until his capture by Sulla
in 105 B.C.. An illegitimate son, he gained his throne by murdering
those more legitimately entitled to the throne than himself, and he
hung onto it grimly, despite great opposition from certain elements
in the Roman Senate led by Marcus Aemilius Scaurus the Princeps
Senatus. In 109 B.C. (after a disgraceful act of aggression by the
young Aulus Postumius Albinus) Jugurtha went to war against Roman
Africa; Quintus Caecilius Metellus the consul was sent to Africa to
subjugate him, his legates being Gaius Marius and Publius Rutilius
Rufus (both of whom had served as cadets with Jugurtha in Spain years
before). Metellus (who earned the extra cognomen Numidicus from this
campaign) and Marius could not get on, with the result that Marius
ran for consul in 108 B.C. for 107 in office, and had the Plebeian
Assembly take the command in the war off Metellus Numidicus, who
never forgave him. Marius did well against the Numidian army, but
Jugurtha himself constantly eluded capture until Sulla, then Marius's
quaestor, persuaded King Bocchus of Mauretania to trick Jugurtha, who
was captured and sent to Rome. He walked in Marius's triumphal parade
on New Year's Day of 104 B.C., then was thrown into the lower chamber
of the Tullianum and left there to starve to death.
Juno Moneta
Juno of Warnings, or perhaps Reminders. Rome's
highest goddess, Juno had many guises, including Juno Moneta. It was
her gaggle of sacred geese which cackled so loudly they woke Marcus
Manlius in time for him to dislodge the Gauls trying to scale the
Capitol cliffs in 390 B.C. The mint was located inside the podium of
her temple on the Arx of the Capitol; from this fact, we obtain our
English word "money."
Jupiter Optimus Maximus
Literally, "Jupiter Best and
Greatest.'' He was the king of the Roman pantheon, Rome's Great God.
He had a huge and magnificent temple on the Capitolium of the
Capitol, and his own special priest, the flamen Dialis.
Jupiter Stator
Jupiter the Stayer. It is a title having to do with
military men and matters; Jupiter Stator was that aspect of Jupiter
who arrested retreats, gave soldiers the courage to stand and fight,
hold their ground. Two temples of Jupiter Stator existed, one very
old establishment on the corner of the Via Sacra and the Velia
adjacent to the Clivus Palatinus (it was here Gaius Marius hid after
his defeat by Sulla in 88 B.C.), and the other Rome's first allmarble temple, on the Campus Martius adjacent to the Porticus
Metelli.
Kingdom of the Parthians
Regnum Parthorum. This is the way the
ancients expressed the name of that vast area of western Asia under
the domination of the King of the Parthians. It was not called
Parthia; Parthia was a small nation to the northeast of the Caspian
Sea, near Bactria, and was important only because it had produced the
seven great Pahlavi families, and the Arsacid Parthian kings. By the
time of Marius and Sulla the Arsacid Parthian kings held sway over
all of the lands between the Euphrates River of Mesopotamia and the
Indus River of modern Pakistan. The King of the Parthians did not
live in Parthia itself, but ruled his domains from Seleuceia-onTigris in winter and Ecbatana in summer. Pahlavi satraps ruled the
various regions into which the Kingdom of the Parthians was split up,
but only as the King's designated representatives. Though government
was loose and no genuine national feeling existed, the King of the
Parthians held his empire together by military excellence. The army
was purely cavalry, but of two different kinds: light-armed bowmen
who delivered the "Parthian shot" twisted facing backward as they
pretended to flee, and cataphracts who were clad from head to foot in
chain mail, as were their horses. Thanks to Syrian Seleucid contacts,
the Parthian court's oriental atmosphere was partially leavened by a
little Hellenism.
knights The equites,
the members of the Ordo Equester. It had
all started when the kings of Rome enrolled the city's top citizens
as a special cavalry unit provided with horses paid for from the
public purse. At that time, horses of good enough quality were both
scarce and extremely costly. When the young Republic came into being
there were 1,800 men so enrolled, grouped into eighteen centuries. As
the Republic grew, so too did the number of knights, but all the
extra knights were obliged to buy their own horses and maintain them
at their own expense. However, by the second century B.C. Rome was no
longer providing her own cavalry; the knights became a social and
economic entity having little to do with military matters, though the
State continued to provide the 1,800 senior knights with the Public
Horse. The knights were now defined by the censors in economic terms;
the original eighteen centuries holding the 1,800 senior knights
remained at one hundred men each, but the rest of the knights'
centuries (some seventy-one) swelled within themselves to contain
many more than one hundred men. Thus all the men who qualified at the
census as knights were accommodated within the First Class.
Until 123 B.C., all senators were knights as well; it was
Gaius Sempronius Gracchus (see The Gracchi) who in that year split
the Senate off as a separate body of three hundred men, and gave the
knights the title Ordo Equester. The sons of senators and other
nonsenatorial members of senatorial families continued to be
classified as knights. To qualify as a knight at the census (held on
a special tribunal in the lower Forum Romanum), a man had to have
property or assets giving him an income in excess of 400,000
sesterces. There was no restriction upon the nature of the activities
which brought him in his income, as there was on the senator.
From the time of Gaius Gracchus down to the end of the
Republic, the knights either controlled or temporarily lost control
of the major courts which tried senators for minor treason or
provincial extortion; this meant the knights were often at
loggerheads with the Senate. There was nothing to stop a knight who
qualified for the senatorial means test becoming a senator if the
censors agreed upon a vacancy falling due; that by and large the
knights did not aspire to the Senate was purely because of the
knightly love of trade and commerce, both forbidden fruit for
senators. The members of the Ordo Equester liked the thrills of the
business forum more than they craved the thrills of the political
forum.
Lar
Plural, Lares. These were among the most Roman of all gods,
having no form, shape, sex, number, or mythology. They were numina.
There were many different kinds of Lares, who might function as the
protective spirits or forces of a locality (as with crossroads and
boundaries), a social group (as with the family's private Lar, the
Lar Familiaris), an activity such as voyaging (the Lares Permarini),
or a whole nation (as with Rome's public Lares, the Lares
Praestites). By the late Republic they had acquired both form and
sex, and were depicted (in the form of small statues) as two young
men with a dog. It is doubtful, however, whether a Roman actually
believed by this that there were only two of them, or that they owned
this form and sex; more perhaps that the increasing complexity of
life made it convenient to tag them in a concrete way.
latifundia
Large tracts of public land leased by one person and run
as a single unit in the manner of a modern ranch. That is, the
activity was purely grazing, not farming. They were usually staffed
by slaves who increasingly became treated like chain-gang prisoners
and were locked at night in barracks called ergastula.
Latin Rights
ius Latii. They were an intermediate citizen status
between the nadir of non-citizenship as suffered by the Italian
Allies and the zenith of the full Roman citizenship. In other words,
they were a typically Roman ploy to soothe ruffled non-citizen
feelings without conceding the full citizenship. Those having the
Latin Rights shared privileges in common with Roman citizens; booty
was divided equally, contracts with full citizens could be entered
into and legal protection sought for these contracts, marriage was
allowed with full citizens, and there was the right to appeal against
capital convictions. However, there was no suffragium—no right to
vote in any Roman election. Nor the right to sit on a Roman jury.
After the revolt of Fregellae in 125 B.C. (this was a Latin Rights
town grown tired of waiting for the full citizenship), an unknown
tribune of the plebs in 123 B.C. passed a law allowing the
magistrates of Latin Rights communities to assume the full
citizenship for themselves and their direct descendants in
perpetuity—another typically Roman ploy, as it soothed the ruffled
feelings of a town's important men, yet did nothing to enfranchise
the ordinary residents.
Latium
The region of Italy in which Rome was situated; it received
its name from the original inhabitants, called Latini. Its northern
boundary was the Tiber, its southern a point extending inland from
the seaport of Circei; on the east it bordered the lands of the
Sabines and Marsi. When the Roman conquest of the Volsci and the
Aequi was completed by 300 B.C., Latium became purely Roman.
Lautumiae
The ancient tufa-stone quarry in the base of the
northeast cliffs of the Arx of the Capitol. The earliest of the
buildings contained in the Forum Romanum of Marius and Sulla's day
were made from stone quarried there. At some time a prison was built
in the convenient quarry's lap, but as lengthy incarceration was not
a Roman concept, the place was never rendered secure. The Lautumiae
was a collection of holding cells—mostly used, it seems, to confine
recalcitrant magistrates and politicians. As punishment for crime,
the Romans preferred exile to imprisonment. It was much cheaper.
legate Legatus.
The most senior members of the Roman general's
military staff were his legates. In order to be classified as a
legate, a man had to be of senatorial rank, and often was a consular
(it appears these elder statesmen occasionally hankered after a spell
of army life, and volunteered their services to a general commanding
some interesting campaign). Legates answered only to the general, and
were senior to all types of military tribune.
legion Legio.
This was the smallest Roman military unit capable of
fighting a war on its own (though it was rarely called upon to do
so). That is, it was complete within itself in terms of manpower,
equipment, and facilities. By the time of Marius and Sulla, a Roman
army engaged in any major campaign rarely consisted of fewer than
four legions—though equally rarely of more than six legions. Single
legions without prospect of reinforcement did garrison duty in places
where rebellions or raids were small-scale. A legion contained
something over five thousand soldiers divided into ten cohorts of six
centuries each, and about one thousand men of noncombatant status;
there was a modest cavalry squadron attached to the legion under
normal circumstances. Each legion fielded its own artillery and
matèriel. If a legion was one of the consul's legions, it was
commanded by up to six elected tribunes of the soldiers; if it
belonged to a general not currently consul, it was commanded by a
legate, or else by the general himself. Its regular officers were
centurions, of which it possessed some sixty. Though the troops
belonging to a legion camped together, they did not live together en
masse; instead, they were divided into units of eight men who tented
and messed together.
legionary
This is the correct English word to describe an ordinary
soldier (miles gregarius) in a Roman legion. "Legionnaire," which I
have sometimes seen instead, is more properly the term applied to a
member of the French Foreign Legion.
lex
Plural, leges. A law. The word "lex" came to be applied also to
a plebiscitum (plebiscite), which was a law passed in the Plebeian
Assembly. A lex was not considered valid until it had been inscribed
on bronze or stone and deposited in the vaults below the temple of
Saturn. However, logic says the tablet's residence in the temple of
Saturn must have been brief, as the vaults could not have contained
anything like the number of tablets necessary to hold the body of
Roman law at the time of Marius and Sulla— especially not when the
Treasury also lay beneath the temple of Saturn. I imagine the tablets
were whisked in and out to be stored permanently elsewhere.
leges Caecilia Didia
I have called the first one prima, as it
figures more prominently in the book than the second lex Caecilia
Didia. The first of these two laws stipulated that three nundinae or
market days must elapse between the first contio to promulgate a law
in any of the Assemblies and the vote which passed a bill into law.
There is some debate as to whether the waiting period was seventeen
or twenty-four days; I have chosen the smaller wait because it seems
more Roman. The second lex Caecilia Didia forbade the tacking of
unrelated matters together to form one law. They were passed by the
consuls of 98 B.C.
lex Calpurnia de civitate sociorum
The law of Piso Frugi
passed in 89 B.C. Originally it stipulated that all the new citizens
of the lex Julia should be placed in two newly created tribes; when
this caused a huge outcry, Piso Frugi changed his law to admit the
new citizens to his two new tribes plus eight existing tribes.
leges Corneliae
The laws of Sulla, passed in 88 B.C., during his
consulship. They fall into three lots, passed at different times. At
the beginning of his consulship he passed two laws to regulate Rome's
rocky finances; the first stipulated that all debtors were to pay
simple interest only on loans at the rate agreed to by both parties
at the time the loan was made. The second waived the lodgment of
sponsio (that is, the sum in dispute) with the praetor in cases of
debt, enabling the praetor to hear the case.
After the slaughter in Asia Province by Mithridates and before
the laws of Sulpicius came Sulla's agrarian law. It gave the
confiscated lands of the rebel towns Pompeii, Faesulae, Hadria,
Telesia, Bovianum, and Grumentum to Sulla's veteran soldiers upon
their retirement. The final batch of laws was passed after Sulla's
march on Rome.
The first waived the waiting period of the lex Caecilia Didia
prima.
The second added three hundred members to the Senate, to be
appointed by the censors in the usual way.
The third repealed the lex Hortensia of 287 B.C. by
stipulating that nothing could now be brought before the tribal
Assemblies unless the Senate issued a consultum. The wording of the
consultum could not be changed in the Assemblies.
The fourth returned the Centuriate Assembly to the form it had
known under King Servius Tullius, thus giving the First Class of
voters almost 50 percent of the voting power.
The fifth prohibited either discussion of or passing of laws
in the tribal Assemblies. All laws in future were to be discussed and
passed in the Centuriate Assembly only.
leges Sulpiciae
The sixth repealed all of the
because they
had been passed with violence during legally declared religious
holidays.
The seventh indicted twenty men on charges of high treason
(perduellio)—and damned them—in the Centuriate Assembly. Gaius
Marius, Young Marius, Sulpicius, Brutus the urban praetor, Cethegus,
the Brothers Granii, Albinovanus, Laetorius, and eleven more were
named.
lex Domitia de sacerdotiis
Passed in 104 B.C. by Gnaeus Domitius
Ahenobarbus, later Pontifex Maximus. It required that future members
of the College of Pontifices and College of Augurs be elected by a
special tribal Assembly comprising seventeen tribes chosen by lot.
lex Julia de civitate Latinis et sociis danda
Passed by Lucius
Julius Caesar at the end of his consulship in 90 B.C. It gave the
Roman citizenship to all Italians who had not taken up arms against
Rome during the Marsic War. Presumably it also fully enfranchised all
Latin Rights communities in Italy.
lex Licinia Mucia
Passed by the consuls of 95 B.C. in response to
an outcry about the number of spurious Roman citizens who appeared on
the census rolls in 96 B.C. It legislated the creation of a number of
special courts (quaestiones) to enquire into the credentials of all
new names on the citizen register, and prescribed severe penalties
for those found to have falsified citizenship.
lex Plautia iudiciaria
Passed in the Plebeian Assembly
It changed the frame of reference of the so-called Varian
to prosecute those who had opposed enfranchisement of the
Further, it took the court off the knights and gave it to
all and any Classes right across the thirty-five tribes.
in 89 B.C.
Commission
Italians.
citizens of
lex Plautia Papiria
Passed by the Plebeian Assembly in 89 B.C. It
extended the full citizenship to any Italian with his name on an
Italian municipal roll (if an insurgent, it required that he withdraw
from all hostilities against Rome) provided the applicant lodged his
case with the urban praetor inside Rome within sixty days of the
passing of the law.
lex Pompeia
Passed by the
law gave the full citizenship
of the Padus River in Italian
Celtic tribes attached to the
Mediolanum north of the Padus
consul of 89 B.C., Pompey Strabo. This
to every Latin Rights community south
Gaul, and gave the Latin Rights to
towns of Aquileia, Patavium, and
River.
leges Sulpiciae
There were four such, passed after the consul
Sulla had been given command of the war against Mithridates in about
September of 88 B.c: The first recalled all those exiled under the
terms of the Varian Commission; the second provided that all the new
Roman citizens should be distributed equally across the thirty-five
tribes, and that the freedmen of Rome also be distributed across the
thirty-five tribes; the third expelled all senators in debt for more
than two thousand denarii from the Senate; and the fourth took the
command of the war against Mithridates off Sulla and gave it to
Marius. After Sulla's march on Rome, his laws were annulled.
lex Varia de maiestate
Passed in the Plebeian Assembly by Quintus
Varius Severus Hybrida Sucronensis in 90 B.C. It created a special
court (thereafter always called the Varian Commission) to try those
accused of attempting to secure the Roman citizenship for Italians.
lex Voconia de mulierum hereditatibus
Passed in 169 B.C.
This law severely curtailed the right of women to inherit from wills.
Under no circumstances could she be designated the principal heir,
even if she was the only child of her father; his nearest agnate
relatives (that is, on the father's side) superseded her. Cicero
quotes a case where it was argued that the lex Voconia did not apply
because the dead man's property had not been assessed at a census;
but the praetor (Gaius Verres) overruled the argument and refused to
allow the girl in question to inherit. The law was certainly got
around, for we know of several great heiresses; by securing a law
waiving the lex Voconia, perhaps; or by dying intestate, in which
case the old law prevailed, and children inherited irrespective of
sex or close agnate relatives. Until Sulla as dictator established
permanent quaestiones there does not appear to have been a court to
hear testamentary disputes, which meant the urban praetor must have
had the final say.
LIBERO
The verdict of acquittal in a trial conducted in one of
the voting Assemblies.
licker-fish
A freshwater bass of the Tiber River. It was found only
between the Wooden Bridge and the Pons Aemilius, where it lurked
around the outflows of the great sewers and fed upon what the sewers
disgorged. Apparently it was so well fed that it was notoriously
difficult to catch— which may be why it was regarded as a great
delicacy.
lictor
One of the few genuine public servants of Rome. There was a
College of Lictors; how many it contained is uncertain, but enough
certainly to provide the traditional single-file escort for all
holders of imperium, both within and without the city, and to perform
other duties as well. Two or three hundred lictors all told may not
have been unlikely. A lictor had to be a full Roman citizen, but that
he was lowly seems fairly sure, as his official wage was minimal; he
relied heavily upon gratuities from those he escorted. Within the
college the lictors were divided into groups of ten (decuries), each
headed by a prefect; there were several presidents of the college as
a whole. Inside Rome the lictor wore a plain white toga; outside Rome
he wore a crimson tunic with a wide black belt heavily ornamented in
brass; at funerals he wore a black toga. I have located the College
of Lictors behind the temple of the Lares Praestites on the eastern
side of the Forum Romanum adjacent to the great inn on the corner of
the Clivus Orbius, but there is no factual evidence to support this
location. Long-haired Gaul See Gallia Comata.
Lucania
Western peninsular Italy lying south of Campania and north
of Bruttium—the front of the Italian ankle and foot. It was a wild
and mountainous area and contained huge and magnificent forests of
fir and pine. Its people— called Lucani—had strong ties with the
Samnites, the Hirpini, and the Venusini, and bitterly resented Roman
incursions into Lucania.
Lucius Tiddlypuss See
ludi Romani See games.
Lusitani The people of the
Tiddlypuss, Lucius.
southwestern and western areas of the
Iberian peninsula; they lay beyond the frontiers of the Roman
province of Further Spain, and strenuously resisted all Roman
attempts to penetrate their lands. They also regularly invaded
Further Spain to annoy the Roman occupiers.
lustrum This word came to mean two things, both connected with the
office of censor. It meant the entire five-year term the censors
served, but also meant the ceremony with which the censors concluded
the census of the ordinary Roman People on the Campus Martius.
magistrates
The elected executives of the Senate and People of
Rome. By the middle Republic, all the men who held magistracies were
members of the Senate (elected quaestors, if not already senators,
were normally approved as senators by the next pair of censors). This
gave the Senate a distinct advantage over the People, until the
People (in the person of the Plebs) took over the lawmaking. The
magistrates represented the executive arm of government. In order of
seniority, the most junior magistrate was the elected tribune of the
soldiers, who was not old enough to be admitted to the Senate under
the lex Villia annalis, yet was nonetheless a true magistrate. Then;
in ascending order came the quaestor, the tribune of the plebs, the
plebeian aedile, the curule aedile, the praetor, the consul, and the
censor. Only the curule aedile, the praetor, and the consul held
imperium. Only the quaestorship, praetorship, and consulship
constituted the cursus honorum. Tribunes of the soldiers, quaestors,
and curule aediles were elected by the Assembly of the People;
tribunes of the plebs and plebeian aediles were elected by the
Plebeian Assembly; and praetors, consuls, and censors were elected by
the Centuriate Assembly. In times of emergency, the Senate was
empowered to create an extraordinary magistrate, the dictator, who
served for six months only, and was indemnified against answering for
his dictatorial actions after his term as dictator was over. The
dictator himself appointed a Master of the Horse to function as his
war leader and second-in-command. On the death or incapacitation of a
consul, the Senate was also empowered to appoint a suffect consul
without holding an election. Save for the censors, all magistrates
served for one year only. maiestas Treason. After Lucius Appuleius
Saturninus first put maiestas minuta ("little treason") on the law
tablets as a criminal charge, the old-style treason charge of
perduellio (high treason) was virtually abandoned. Saturninus set up
a special court or quaestio to hear charges of maiestas minuta during
his first term as tribune of the plebs in 103 B.C.; it was staffed
entirely by knights, though the men tried in it were usually
senators.
[GC 1037.jpg]
manumission
The act of freeing a slave (manumit, manumitted).
When the slave's master was a Roman citizen, manumission
automatically endowed the slave with the Roman citizenship, However,
the freed slave, or freedman, had little opportunity to exercise his
franchise, as he was placed in one of two of the four urban tribes—
Esquilina or Suburana—and therefore found his vote worthless in
tribal elections; his economic lowliness (though slaves occasionally
did manage to make a lot of money) meant he was not made a member of
one of the Five Classes, so he could not vote in the Centuriate
Assembly either. The manumitted slave took the name of his old master
as his new name, adding to it his original slave name as a cognomen.
A slave might be manumitted in any one of several ways: by buying his
freedom out of his earnings; as a special gesture of the master's on
some great occasion like a coming-of-age birthday; after an agreed
number of years in service; in a will. Though technically the
freedman was the equal of his master, in actual fact he was obliged
to remain in his old master's clientship, unless this was formally
dispensed with. Despite this, most slaves found the Roman citizenship
highly desirable, not so much for themselves as for their freeborn
descendants. The freedman was obliged for the rest of his life to
wear a slightly conical skullcap on the back of his head; this was
the Cap of Liberty.
Marsi
One of the most important of the Italian peoples. The Marsi
lived around the shores of the Fucine Lake, which belonged to them;
their territory extended into the high Apennines. Their history
indicates that they were always loyal to Rome until came the time of
the Marsic War. They were affluent, martial, and populous, and had
adopted Latin as their language fairly early. Their chief town was
Marruvium; the larger and more important town of Alba Fucens was a
Latin Rights colony seeded on Marsic territory by Rome. The Marsi
worshipped snakes, and were famous snake charmers.
Martha The Syrian prophetess who predicted that Gaius Marius would be
consul of Rome seven times, and did this before he had been consul at
all. She extracted a promise from Marius that he would bring her from
Africa to Rome, where she lived in his house as his guest until she
died, and regularly scandalized Rome's populace by appearing in a
purple litter. My own novelist's license added the second part to her
prophecy—that Marius would be eclipsed in greatness by his wife's
nephew; I did this to make later events more logical.
mentula Plural, mentulae. The Latin obscenity for the penis.
mentulam caco
"I shit on your prick!"
merda A Latin obscenity referring more to the droppings of
animals than to human excrement.
Metrobius
Plutarch attests to the existence of this beloved
boyfriend of Sulla's, and gives us his name—Metrobius.
Middle Sea
The name I have given the Mediterranean Sea, which
had not at the time of Marius and Sulla acquired its later name of
Mare Nostrum—"Our Sea." Properly, at the time of Marius and Sulla it
was called Mare Internum.
Military Man
Vir militaris. He was a man whose whole career
revolved around the army, and who continued to serve in the army
after his obligatory number of campaigns or years had expired. He
entered the political arena relying upon his military reputation to
recommend him to the electors. Many Military Men never bothered to
enter the political arena at all, but if such a one wanted to general
an army, he had to attain the rank of praetor, and that meant a
political career. Gaius Marius, Quintus Sertorius, Titus Didius,
Gaius Pomptinus, and Publius Ventidius were all Military Men; but
Caesar the Dictator, the greatest military man of them all, was never
a Military Man.
military tribune
modius Plural,
See tribune, military.
modii. The measure of grain in Rome. One modius
weighed thirteen pounds, or six kilograms.
Mormolyce
Also known as Mormo. A children's bogey, she appears
to have been an historical figure, at least in myth. The queen of a
race of cannibal giants, she lost her children, and ever afterward
preyed upon the children of humankind.
mos maiorum
The established order of things. Perhaps the best
definition is to say that the mos maiorum was Rome's unwritten
constitution. Mos meant established customs; maiores meant ancestors
or forebears in this context. The mos maiorum was how things had
always been done.
Nearer Spain Hispania Citerior. The territory of this Roman province
embraced the Mediterranean coastal plain and the mountainous
foothills beyond it all the way from the Pyrenees to just south of
the seaport of New Carthage. The southern boundary splitting the
Further province off from it was fairly tenuous, but seems to have
run between the range of mountains called the Orospeda and the taller
range behind Abdera called the Solorius. In the time of Marius and
Sulla the largest settlement was New Carthage (modern Cartagena)
because the Orospeda ranges behind this seaport were honeycombed with
productive silver mines the Romans had taken over when Carthage fell.
Only one other part of the province was of much interest to its Roman
owners; the valley of the Iberus River (modern Ebro) and its
tributaries, this area being very rich. The governor had two seats:
New Carthage in the south and Tarraco in the north. Nearer Spain was
never as economically important to Rome as the Further province; it
was, however, the only land route to Further Spain, and therefore had
to be kept subdued.
nefas
Sacrilege.
nobleman
Nobilis. A man and his descendants were described as
noble once he had achieved his consulship. This was an artificial
aristocracy invented by the plebeians in order to cut the patricians
down to size, since more plebeians reached the consulship than did
patricians once the first century of the Republic was over. By the
time of Marius and Sulla, nobility mattered greatly. Some modern
authorities extend the term nobilis to cover those men who reached
the status of praetor without ever attaining the consulship. However,
my feeling is that to have admitted praetors into the plebeian
nobility would have demeaned the exclusivity of nobility too much.
Therefore I have reserved the term nobleman for those men of proven
consular family.
nomen
The family, clan, or gentilicial name—the title of the
gens. Cornelius, Julius, Domitius, Livius, Marius, Marcius, Junius,
Sulpicius, et cetera, are all nomina (plural), gentilicial names. I
have not used the word gens very much in this book, as it takes a
feminine ending—gens Julia, gens Aurelia, et cetera—too confusing for
non-Latinate readers.
Numidia
A kingdom in ancient middle North Africa which always
surrounded the limited lands owned by Carthage (lands which became
the Roman African province). The original inhabitants were Berbers,
and lived a semi-nomadic life. After the defeat of Carthage, Rome
encouraged the establishment of a regal dynasty, the first member of
which was King Masinissa. The capital of Numidia was Cirta.
October Horse
On the Ides of October (this was about the time
the old campaigning season used to finish), the best war-horses of
that year were picked out and harnessed in pairs to chariots. They
then raced on the sward of the Campus Martius, rather than in one of
the circuses. The right-hand horse of the winning team was sacrificed
to Mars on an altar specially erected to Mars adjacent to the course
of the race. The animal was killed with a spear, after which its head
was severed and piled over with little cakes, while its tail and
genitals were rushed to the Regia in the Forum Romanum, and the blood
dripped onto the Regia's altar. Once the ceremonies over the cakedecorated horse's head were ended, it was thrown at two crowds of
people, one comprising the residents of the Subura, the other
residents of the Via Sacra; they fought for possession of it. If the
people of the Via Sacra won, they nailed the head to the outside wall
of the Regia; if the people of the Subura won, they nailed it to the
outside wall of the Turris Mamilia (the most conspicuous building in
the Subura). What was the reason behind all this is not known; modern
scholars tend to think it was concerned with the closing of the
campaign season in much earlier times than the day of Marius and
Sulla, by which era the Romans themselves may not have been sure of
its origins. We do not know whether the war-horses involved in the
race were Public Horses or not; one might presume they were Public
Odysseus
Horses.
To Romans, he was Ulysses. King of Ithaca in
days of legend. One of the main characters in Homer's Iliad, he was
the hero of Homer's Odyssey. By nature crafty, brilliant, and
deceitful (deceit was not necessarily odious to the ancient Greeks),
he was also a great warrior, strong enough to own a bow no other man
could bend and string; physically he was red-haired, left-handed,
grey-eyed, and so short in the legs that he looked "taller sitting
than he did standing." Having fought for the whole ten years at Troy
(Ilium) and survived, Odysseus set out for home when the war was
over, bearing as his special prize old Queen Hekabe (Hecuba), widow
of King Priam of Troy. But he soon abandoned her, disgusted at her
weeping and wailing, and then became embroiled in a decade of amazing
adventures which took him all over the Mediterranean. At the end of
ten years (having been away for twenty) he arrived home in Ithaca,
where his wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus, and his dog,
Argus, had all waited for him faithfully. The first thing he did was
to string his bow and shoot an arrow through the hollows in a series
of axe heads, after which he turned his mighty weapon upon his wife's
importunate suitors, and killed them all, his son helping. After
that, he settled down with Penelope and lived happily ever after.
Ordo Equester
Oxyntas A son of
See knights.
King Jugurtha of Numidia, he walked with his
brother Iampsas in Gaius Marius's triumphal parade of 104 B.C. His
father was put to death immediately afterward, but Oxyntas was sent
to the town of Venusia, where he remained until 89 B.C. What happened
to him after the Marsic War is not known.
Parthia See Kingdom of the Parthians.
paterfamilias The head of the family
unit. His right to do as he
pleased with his family was rigidly protected at law.
patricians
The original Roman aristocracy. Patricians were
distinguished citizens before there were kings of Rome, and after the
establishment of the Republic they kept the title of patrician, as
well as a prestige unattainable by any plebeian—and this in spite of
the nobility, the "new aristocracy" ennobled above mere plebeian
status by having consuls in the family. However, as the Republic grew
older and the power of the plebeians grew in pace with their wealth,
the special rights and entitlements of the patricians were inexorably
stripped from them, until by the time of Marius and Sulla they tended
to be relatively impoverished compared to those of the plebeian
nobility. Not all patrician clans were of equal antiquity; the Julii
and the Fabii were some centuries older in their tenure of patrician
status than the Claudii. Patricians married in a form called
confarreatio which was virtually for life, and patrician women never
were allowed the relative emancipation of their plebeian sisters.
Certain priesthoods could be held only by patricians—the Rex Sacrorum
and the flamen Dialis—and certain senatorial positions could only be
held by patricians— head of a decury, interrex, Princeps Senatus. At
the time of Marius and Sulla the following patrician families were
still regularly producing senators (if not praetors and consuls):
Aemilius, Claudius, Cornelius, Fabius (but through adoption only),
Julius, Manlius, Pinarius, Postumius, Sergius, Servilius, Sulpicius,
and Valerius.
patronage
Roman Republican society was organized into a system of
patronage and clientship (see also client). Though perhaps the
smallest businessmen and the ordinary lowly workers of Rome were not
always participants in the system, the system was nevertheless very
prevalent at all levels of society, and not all patrons were from the
uppermost levels of society. The patron undertook to offer protection
and favors to those who acknowledged themselves his clients. Freed
slaves were in the patronage of their ex-masters. No woman could be a
patron. Many patrons were clients of more powerful patrons than
themselves, which technically made their clients also the clients of
their patron. Though at law the domestic system was not recognized,
there was a very strong principle of honor involved, and it was a
rare client who ignored or cheated his patron. The patron might do
nothing for years to obtain help or support from a client, but one
day the client would be called upon to do his patron a favor—vote for
him, or lobby for him, or perform some special task. It was customary
for the patron to see his clients at dawn on "business" days in the
calendar; at these matinees the clients would ask for help or favor,
or merely attend to show respect, or offer services. The patron, if
he was rich or generous, often bestowed gifts of money upon his
clients when they assembled at such times. If a man became the client
of another man whom in earlier days he had hated to the point of
implacable enmity, that client would thereafter serve his erstwhile
enemy, now his patron, with complete fidelity, even to death (vide
Caesar the Dictator and Curio the Younger).
pedagogue
Paedagogus. A teacher of young children. He was the man
who instilled rudimentary education—reading, writing, arithmetic. His
status was usually that of a slave or freedman, he lived within the
family unit as a particularly privileged servant, and his nationality
was more often than not Greek; he was, however, required to teach in
Latin as well as Greek.
pedarius
Penates
Plural, pedarii. See Senate.
The Di Penates, the gods of the storage cupboards. Among
the oldest and most numinous of all Roman gods, the Di Penates were
worshipped in every Roman house in conjunction with Vesta (spirit of
the hearth) and the Lar Familiaris. Like the Lares, the Di Penates
eventually acquired a form, shape and sex, and were depicted as two
youths, usually bronze statuettes. The Roman State had its own Di
Publici
Penates, called the Penates
—guardians of the State's wellbeing and solvency.
Penelope The wife of Odysseus, King of Ithaca (see Odysseus). He won
her in a footrace her father, Icarius, staged among her suitors. When
it was prophesied that if Odysseus went to the war against Troy
(Ilium), he would be away for twenty years, Penelope and her infant
son, Telemachus, settled down to wait for him. The succession to the
throne of Ithaca must have been matrilineal, for, presuming Odysseus
dead, a large number of suitors for Penelope's hand in marriage moved
into the palace and stayed for the duration. She refused to marry
anyone until she had finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law,
Laertes; every night she unraveled what she had woven the previous
day. According to Homer, this ploy worked until Odysseus returned
home and killed the suitors.
People of Rome
This term embraced every single Roman who was not
a member of the Senate; it applied to patricians as well as to
plebeians, and to the Head Count as well as to the First Class.
perduellio High
treason. Until the later Republic saw the
introduction of the lesser form of treason called maiestas (see
Saturninus), perduellio was the only form treason had in Roman law.
Old enough to be mentioned in the Twelve Tables, it required a trial
process in the Centuriate Assembly, cumbersome and glaringly public
until the secret ballot was finally extended to trial in the
centuries. It was, however, virtually impossible to persuade the
centuries to convict a man of perduellio unless he stood there and
openly admitted that he had conspired to make war upon Rome— and
Roman political miscreants were not so stupid. It carried an
automatic death penalty.
peristyle
An enclosed garden or courtyard which was surrounded by a
colonnade and formed the outdoor segment of a house.
permutatio
A banking term. It meant that sums of money could be
transferred between institutions inside and outside Rome, sometimes
over very long distances, without the actual money changing hands.
Phrygia This was one of the wilder and less populated parts of
Anatolia, synonymous to the ancients with nymphs, dryads, satyrs, and
other mythical woodland folk, as well as with peasants so naive and
defenseless they were ridiculously easy to enslave. Phrygia lay
Paphlagonia
inland from Bithynia, south of
, and west of Galatia.
Its southern boundary was with Pisidia. Mountainous and heavily
forested, it was a part of the Attalid empire of Pergamum; after
settling the wars following the bequest of the Kingdom of Pergamum to
Rome, the Roman proconsul Manius Aquillius literally sold most of
Phrygia to the fifth King Mithridates of Pontus in return for a
large sum of gold. Aquillius kept the gold for himself.
Picenum
That part of the eastern Italian peninsula roughly
occupying the area of the Italian leg's calf muscle. Its western
boundary followed the ridge of the Apennines; to its north lay
Umbria, and to its south Samnium. Since it possessed a good section
of the Adriatic coast, it possessed several seaports, the most
important of which were Ancona and Firmum Picenum. The main inland
town and capital city was Asculum Picentum. The original inhabitants
were of Italiote and Illyrian stock, but when the first King Brennus
invaded Italy many of his Celtic tribesmen settled in Picenum, and
intermarried with the earlier folk. There was also a tradition that
Sabines from the other side of the Apennines had migrated to settle
Picenum. Its people were referred to as Picentines or Picentes. The
region fell more or less into two parts—northern Picenum, closely
allied to southern Umbria, was under the sway of the great family
called Pompeius, whereas Picenum south of the Flosis River was
connected more closely to Samnium in the spiritual ties of its
people.
pilum
Plural, pila. The Roman infantry spear, especially as
modified by Gaius Marius. It had a very small, wickedly barbed head
of iron and an upper shaft of iron; this was joined to a shaped
wooden stem which fitted the hand comfortably. Marius modified it by
introducing a weakness into the junction between iron and wooden
sections of the shaft; when the pilum lodged in a shield or enemy's
body, it broke apart, and thus was of no use to enemy soldiers. The
Roman legions, however, possessed craftsmen who could quickly mend
pila after a battle.
Pisidia
This region lay to the south of Phrygia, and was even
wilder and more backward. Extremely mountainous and filled with
lakes, its climate was held to be a very healthy one. Little industry
or populous settlement existed; the countryside was heavily forested
with magnificent pines. Its people apparently were an ancient and
indigenous strain allied to the Thracians, and its language was
unique. Those few Pisidians who came to the notice of Rome and Romans
were famous for their bizarre religious beliefs.
Plautus His
real name was Titus Maccius Plautus. An Umbrian, he
lived during the third century B.C., and died at some date after 184
B.C. During his long career he wrote about 130 plays. He worked in
the comedic form, and in Latin; though his plots were essentially
borrowed from Greek comedy, he contributed an unmistakably Roman feel
to his plays, shifting his locales from Greece to Rome, enhancing the
importance of slave characters, and giving his Roman or Italian
audiences a completely comfortable feeling that what they saw was
taking place at home rather than in Greece. His dialogue (even in
modern English translation) is remarkably free and extremely funny.
Critically he failed to be faithful to his own plots and often
succumbed to interpolated scenes having nothing to do with what had
gone before or was yet to come—wit was all. Though no trace of the
music has come down to us, his plays were larded with songs, some
accompanied by a lyre (the canticum) or flute. The importance of
music in Latin comedy relative to Greek comedy may perhaps have been
a heritage from the Etruscans; the music in Latin plays may have been
freer and more melodic in our present-day terms than Greek music.
plebeian,
Plebs
All Roman citizens who were not patricians were plebeians—
that is, they belonged to the Plebs (the e is short, so Pleb rhymes
with Feb of "February"). At the beginning of the Republic, no
plebeian could be a priest, a curule magistrate, or even a senator.
This situation lasted only a very short while; one by one the
exclusively patrician institutions crumbled before the onslaught of
the Plebs, that much larger class of citizens not being above
threatening to secede. By the time of Marius and Sulla it could be
said that the Plebs ran Rome, that there was little if any advantage
in being patrician.
plebiscite
Plebiscitum. A law passed in the Plebeian Assembly was
more properly a plebiscitum than a lex. From very early in the
Republic, plebiscites were regarded as legally binding, but the lex
Hortensia of 287 B.C. made this an official fact. From then on, there
was virtually no difference at law between a plebiscitum and a lex.
By the time of Marius and Sulla almost all the legal clerks who were
responsible for putting the laws on tablets and recording them for
posterity neglected to mention whether the laws were plebiscitum or
lex.
pomerium
The sacred boundary enclosing the city of Rome. Marked
by stones called cippi, it was reputedly inaugurated by King Servius
Tullius, and remained without alteration until the later years of
Sulla's career. The pomerium did not exactly follow the Servian
Walls, one good reason why it is doubtful that the Servian Walls were
built by King Servius Tullius—who would surely have caused his walls
to follow the same line as his pomerium. The whole of the ancient
Palatine city of Romulus was enclosed by the pomerium, but the
Aventine lay outside it, and so did the Capitol. Tradition held that
the pomerium might be enlarged only by a man who significantly
increased the size of Roman territory. In religious terms, Rome
herself existed only within the pomerium; all outside it was merely
Roman territory.
pons A bridge.
pontifex The Latin
word for a priest; it has survived to be
absorbed unchanged into most modern European languages. Many Latin
etymologists consider that in very early Roman times the pontifex was
a maker of bridges, and that the making of bridges was considered a
mystical art, thus putting the maker in close touch with the gods. Be
that as it may, by the time the Republic was flourishing the pontifex
was a priest; incorporated into a special college, he served as an
adviser to Rome's magistrates in religious matters— and inevitably
would be a magistrate himself. At first all pontifices had to be
patrician, but a lex Ogulnia of 300 B.C. stipulated that half of the
College of Pontifices had to be plebeian.
Pontifex Maximus
The head of Rome's State-run religion, and
most senior of all priests. He seems to have been an invention of the
infant Republic, a typically masterly Roman way of getting around an
obstacle without ruffling too many feelings; for in the time of the
kings of Rome, the Rex Sacrorum had been the chief priest, this being
a title held by the king. Probably because they considered it unwise
to abolish the Rex Sacrorum, the rulers of the new Republic of Rome
simply created a new pontifex whose role and status were superior to
those of the Rex Sacrorum. This new priest was given the title
Pontifex Maximus; to reinforce his statesmanlike position, he was to
be elected rather than co-opted (as the ordinary pontifices were). At
first he was probably required to be a patrician (the Rex Sacrorum
remained a patrician right through the Republic), but by the middle
of the Republic he was more likely to be a plebeian. He supervised
all the various members of the various priestly colleges—pontifices,
augurs, flamines, fetials, and other minor priests—and the Vestal
Virgins. In Republican times he occupied the most prestigious Stateowned house, but shared it with the Vestal Virgins. His official
headquarters had the status of a temple—the little old Regia in the
Forum Romanum just outside his house.
Pontus A large kingdom at the southeastern end of the Euxine Sea. In
the west it bordered Paphlagonia at Sinope, in the east Colchis at
Apsarus. Inland it bordered Armenia Magna on the east and Armenia
Parva on the southeast; to proper south was Cappadocia, west of it
was Galatia. Wild, untamed, beautiful, and mountainous, Pontus had a
fertile littoral dotted with Greek colony cities like Sinope, Amisus
and Trapezus. Some idea of the climate can be gained from the fact
that Pontus was the original home of the cherry and the rhododendron.
Because the interior of Pontus was divided by three ranges of very
high peaks running parallel to the coastline, it was never in
antiquity a truly combined entity; its kings took tribute rather than
taxed, and allowed each district to run its affairs in the manner
local terrain and sophistication dictated. Gemstones and much
alluvial gold added to the wealth of its kings, the Mithridatidae, as
did silver, tin and iron.
praefectum fabrum
"He who supervises the making." One of
the most important men in a Roman Republican army, technically he was
not even a part of it; he was a civilian appointed to the post of
praefectus fabrum by the general. The praefectus fabrum was
responsible for the equipping and supplying of the army in all
respects, from its animals and their fodder to its men and their
food. Because he let out the contracts to businessmen and
manufacturers for equipment and supplies, he was a very powerful
figure—and unless he was a man of superior integrity, in a perfect
position to enrich himself.
praenomen
The first name of a Roman man. There were very few of
them in use—perhaps twenty at the time of Marius and Sulla, and half
of that twenty were not common, or were confined to the men of one
particular gens, as with Mamercus, confined to the Aemilii Lepidi.
Each gens or clan favored certain praenomina only, which further
reduced the number available! A modern scholar can often tell from a
man's praenomen whether or not that man was a genuine member of the
gens; the Julii, for instance, favored Sextus, Gaius and Lucius only,
so a man called Marcus Julius was not a true Julian of the patrician
gens; the Licinii favored Publius, Marcus and Lucius; the Pompeii
favored Gnaeus, Sextus and Quintus; the Cornelii favored Publius,
Lucius and Gnaeus; the Servilii of the patrician gens favored Quintus
and Gnaeus. Appius belonged only to the Claudii. One of the great
puzzles for modern scholars concerns that Lucius Claudius who was Rex
Sacrorum during the late Republic; Lucius is not a Claudian
praenomen, but as he was certainly a patrician, Lucius Claudius the
Rex Sacrorum must have been a genuine Claudian. I have postulated
that there was a branch of the Claudian gens bearing the praenomen
Lucius which traditionally always held the priesthood of Rex
Sacrorum.
praetor
This was the second most senior position in the hierarchy
of Roman magistrates (excluding the office of censor, a special
case). At the very beginning of the Republic the two highest
magistrates of all were called praetors. But by the end of the fourth
century B.C. the word "consul" was being used to describe these
highest magistrates. One praetor was the sole representative of this
position for many decades thereafter; he was very obviously the
praetor urbanus,
as his duties were confined to the city of
Rome, thus freeing up the two consuls for duty as war leaders away
from Rome. In 242 B.C. a second praetor was created—the praetor
peregrinus. There soon followed Rome's acquisition of overseas
provinces requiring governance, so in 227 B.C. two more praetors were
created, to deal with Sicily and Sardinia/Corsica. In 197 B.C. the
number was increased from four to six praetors, to cope with
governance of the two Spains. However, after that no more praetors
were created; at the time of Marius and Sulla, six seems to have been
the standard number, though in some years the Senate apparently felt
it necessary to bring the number up to eight. There is, I add, modern
argument about this; some scholars think it was Sulla as dictator who
increased the praetors from six to eight, whereas others consider the
number became eight during the time of Gaius Gracchus.
praetor peregrinus
In English, I have chosen to describe the
praetor peregrinus as the foreign praetor because he dealt only with
legal matters and lawsuits involving one or more parties who were not
Roman citizens. By the time of Marius and Sulla the foreign praetor's
duties were confined to the dispensation of justice; he traveled all
over Italy, and sometimes further afield than that. He also heard the
cases involving non-citizens within the city of Rome.
praetor urbanus
In English, the urban praetor. By the time of
Marius and Sulla his duties were almost purely in litigation; he was
responsible for the supervision of justice and the law courts within
the city of Rome. His imperium did not extend beyond the fifth
milestone from Rome, and he was not allowed to leave Rome for more
than ten days at a time. If both the consuls were absent from Rome,
he was its senior magistrate, therefore empowered to summon the
Senate, make decisions about execution of government policies, even
organize the defenses of the city if under threat of attack. It was
his decision as to whether two litigants should proceed to court or
to a formal hearing; in most cases he decided the matter there and
then, without benefit of hearing or trial process.
primus pilus
Later, primipilus. The centurion in command of the
leading century of the leading cohort of a Roman legion, and
therefore the chief centurion of that legion. He rose to this
position by a serial promotion, and was considered the most able man
in the legion. During the time
of Marius and Sulla, the centuries in the leading cohort appear to
have been the same size as all the other centuries.
Princeps Senatus
The Leader of the House. He was chosen by the
censors according to the rules of the mos maiorum: he had to be a
patrician, the leader of his decury, an interrex more times than
anyone else, be of unimpeachable moral integrity, and have more
auctoritas and dignitas than any other patrician senator. The title
of Princeps Senatus was not given for life, but was subject to review
by each new pair of censors, who could remove a man from the post and
substitute another man did the Princeps Senatus fail to measure up.
Marcus Aemilius Scaurus was chosen Princeps Senatus at an early age,
apparently during his consulship in 115 B.C. and long before his term
as censor (109 B.C.); it was unusual for a man to be appointed
Princeps Senatus before he had been censor. Scaurus's winning of the
post was either a signal mark of honor for an extraordinary man, or
else (as some modern scholars have suggested), in 115 B.C. Scaurus
was the most senior patrician senator available for the job. Whatever
the reason behind his appointment, Scaurus held the title Princeps
Senatus until his death in 89 B.C. His successor was Lucius Valerius
Flaccus, consul in 100 B.C. and censor in 97 B.C.
privatus
A private citizen. I use the term in this book to describe
a man who was a member of the Senate but not serving as a magistrate.
proconsul
One serving with the imperium of a consul but not in
office as consul. Proconsular imperium was normally given to a man
who had just finished his year as consul and went to govern a
province or command an army in the name of the Senate and People of
Rome. A man's term as proconsul usually lasted for one year, but was
commonly prorogued beyond that year if the man was engaged in a
campaign against an enemy still unsubdued, or there was no one
suitable to take his place. If a consular was not available to govern
a province difficult enough to warrant a proconsul, one of the year's
crop of praetors was sent to govern it, but endowed with proconsular
imperium. Proconsular imperium was limited to the area of the
proconsul's province or task, and was lost the moment he stepped
across the pomerium into the city of Rome.
proletarii
Another name for the lowliest of all Roman citizens, the
capite censi or Head Count. The word proletarius derived from proles,
which meant progeny, offspring, children in an impersonal sense; the
lowly were called proletarii because children were the only thing
they were capable of producing. I have avoided using the word because
of its Marxist connotations, connotations having absolutely no
validity in ancient times.
propraetor
One serving with the imperium of a praetor but not in
office as a praetor. It was an imperium given to a praetor after his
year in office was over in order to empower him to govern a province
and, if necessary, conduct a defensive war. Like the imperium of the
proconsul, it was lost the moment its holder stepped over the
pomerium into the city of Rome. In degree it was a lesser imperium
than proconsul, and was normally given to the governor of a peaceful
province. According to the rules, any war the propraetor engaged upon
had to be forced upon him, he could not seek it out. However, that
didn't stop propraetors like Gaius Marius making war in their
provinces.
prorogue To extend a man's tenure of magisterial office beyond its
normal time span. It applied to governorships or military commands
rather than to the magistracies themselves. That is, it affected
proconsuls and propraetors. Metellus Numidicus was sent to Africa to
fight Jugurtha while still consul, but had not got his campaign off
the ground when his year as consul expired; his command in the war
against Jugurtha was prorogued into the following year, and into the
year following that. I include the word in this glossary because I
have discovered that modern English language dictionaries of small
and medium size neglect to give this meaning in treating the word
"prorogue."
province Provincia.
Originally this meant the sphere of duty of
a magistrate or promagistrate holding imperium, and therefore applied
as much to consuls and praetors in office inside Rome as it did to
those in the field. Then the word came to mean the place where the
imperium was exercised by its holder, and finally was applied to that
place as simply meaning it was in the ownership of Rome. By the time
of Marius and Sulla, all of Rome's provinces were outside Italy and
Italian Gaul.
publicani
Singular, publicanus. Tax-farmers. These were the great
private companies run from Rome which "farmed" the taxes of various
parts of Rome's growing empire. The whole activity of farming the
taxes was let out on contract by the censors every five years. The
employees of these companies who actually collected the taxes in the
provinces were also called publicani.
Public Horse
A horse which belonged to the State—to the Senate
and People of Rome. Going all the way back to the kings, it had been
State policy to provide the 1,800 most senior knights of Rome with
horses. Presumably when the practice began horses were both scarce
and colossally expensive, otherwise the State of Rome, notoriously
parsimonious, would not have spent its precious money; it would
simply have required its knights to provide their own mounts, as
happened during the Republic when the number of knights far exceeded
1,800.
By the time of Marius and Sulla, to own a Public Horse was a
social cachet of no mean order; the animals were handed down from
generation to generation in the same families, so to possess a Public
Horse was tantamount to saying your family had been around since the
beginning. That this was not so we know from the fact that Pompey
possessed a Public Horse—presumably when a family died out, its
Public Horse was passed to someone of newer origins but enormous
influence. Cato the Censor, considered a peasant New Man, was very
proud to say that his great grandfather (who must have lived during
the fourth century B.C.) had received from the Treasury of Rome the
price of no less than five Public Horses killed under him in battle.
When Gaius Sempronius Gracchus (see The Gracchi) split the
Senate off from the knights, there is no evidence that his law
required that a senator give up his Public Horse because he was no
longer a knight; on the contrary, those of senatorial family who had
possessed the Public Horse continued to possess it, witness Pompey
the Great, and presumably his father.
Though it was not always observed, some censors (including
Cato the Censor) insisted that the 1,800 owners of the Public Horse
parade themselves and their animals in order to make sure that these
men were keeping themselves in shape and caring properly for their
steeds. The parade of the Public Horse, when held, occurred perhaps
on the Ides of July; the censors sat in state on a tribunal atop the
steps of the temple of Castor and Pollux in the Forum Romanum and
watched each holder of the Public Horse solemnly lead his mount in a
kind of march-past. If the censors considered a man had let himself
go to seed, they stripped him of his entitlement to the Public Horse.
Punic The adjective applied to Carthage and its people, but
particularly to the three wars fought between Carthage and Rome. The
word is derived from the origin of the Carthaginians—Phoenicia.
quaestor
The lowest rung on the senatorial cursus honorum. At the
time of Marius and Sulla, to be elected a quaestor did not mean a man
was automatically a member of the Senate; however, it was the normal
practice of the censors to admit quaestors to the Senate. Many who
stood for election as quaestor were already in the Senate. The exact
number of quaestors elected in any one year at this time is not
known, but was perhaps twelve to sixteen. The age at which a man
sought election as a quaestor was thirty, which was also the correct
age for entering the Senate. A quaestor's chief duties were fiscal:
he might be seconded to the Treasury in Rome, or to secondary
treasuries, or to collecting customs and port dues (there were three
such quaestors at this time, one in Ostia, one in Puteoli, and one
who did the other ports), or to collecting Rome's rents from ager
publicus at home and abroad, or to managing the finances of a
province. A consul going to govern a province could ask by name for a
particular man to serve as his quaestor—this was a great distinction
for the man in question, and assured him of both election and a place
in the Senate. Normally the quaestorship lasted for one year, but if
a man was requested by name he was obliged to remain with his chief
until his chief's term came to an end. Quaestors entered office on
the fifth day of December.
Quirites
Literally, Roman citizens of civilian status. What we do
not know is whether the word' “Quirites "also implied that the
citizens in question had never served as soldiers in Rome's armies;
certain remarks of Caesar the Dictator might lead one to believe that
this was so, for he addressed his mutinous soldiers as Quirites, and
in doing so heaped such scorn upon them that they immediately pleaded
for his pardon. However, much changed between the time of Marius and
Sulla and the time of Caesar the Dictator. I have chosen to assume
that at the time of Marius and Sulla, to be hailed as Quirites was no
insult.
quizzing-glass
A magnifying lens on a stick. It had much the same
connotations in the ancient world as a monocle during the early
twentieth century—it was an affectation. It was also, however, of
great good use to one suffering the presbyopia of encroaching age in
an era before the invention of spectacles. It could not contain a
lens specifically ground for the purpose of enlarging print, but some
stones accidentally possessed lens properties, and were thus
immensely valuable objects. We know the emperor Nero had an emerald
quizzing-glass; having seen the wealth of emeralds which came from
Asia Minor, it is logical to assume that the Kings of Pontus had free
access to emeralds, and that an occasional stone was suited for use
in a quizzing-glass.
repetundae
Extortion. Until the time of Gaius Gracchus, it was
not standard practice to prosecute provincial governors who used
their power to enrich themselves; one or two special courts had been
set up to prosecute specific men, but that was all. These early
special courts were staffed entirely by senators, and quickly became
a joke—senatorial juries would not convict their fellows. Then in 122
B.C. Manius Acilius Glabrio, boon companion of Gaius Gracchus, passed
a lex Acilia providing a permanent court staffed by knights to hear
cases of repetundae, and impaneled 450 named knights to act as a pool
from which the juries would be drawn. In 106 B.C. Quintus Servilius
Caepio, consul in that year, returned all courts to the Senate,
including the extortion court. Then in 101 B.C. Gaius Servilius
Glaucia gave the extortion court back to the knights, with many
innovative refinements which were to become standard practice in all
courts. The cases we know of were all concerned with governors of
provinces, but it would seem that after the lex Acilia of 122 B.C.,
the extortion court was empowered to try any kind of case dealing
with illegal enrichment. There were rewards offered to citizen
informants, and non-citizens who successfully brought a prosecution
before the court were rewarded with the citizenship.
Republic
The word was originally two words—res publica—that is,
the thing which constitutes the people as a whole—that is, its
government. We use the word "republic" today to mean an elected
government which does not acknowledge any monarch its superior, but
it is doubtful if the Romans thought of it in quite that way, despite
the fact that they founded their Republic as an alternative to kings.
rhetoric
The art of oratory, something both the Greeks and the
Romans turned into an approximation of science. A proper orator spoke
according to carefully laid out rules and conventions which extended
far beyond mere words; body language and movements were intrinsic
parts of it. In the early and middle Republic teachers of Greek
rhetoric were despised, and sometimes even outlawed from Rome; Cato
the Censor was an avowed enemy of the Greek rhetor. However, the
Graecophilia of Scipio Aemilianus's day broke down much of this Latin
opposition, so that by the time of the Brothers Gracchi most young
Roman noblemen were being taught by Greek rhetors. Whereupon the
Latin rhetors fell into disfavor! There were different styles of
rhetoric—Lucius Licinius Crassus Orator favored the Asianic style,
more florid and dramatic than the Attic style. It must always be
remembered that the audience which gathered to listen to public
oration—be it concerned with politics or the law courts—was composed
of connoisseurs of rhetoric. The audience watched and listened in a
spirit of extreme criticism; it knew all the rules and techniques,
and was not easy to please.
Roma The Latin name of Rome.
Romulus and Remus The twin
sons of Rhea Silvia, daughter of
the King of Alba Longa and the god Mars. Her uncle Amulius, who had
usurped the throne, put the twins in a basket made of rushes and set
them adrift on the Tiber. They were washed up beneath a fig tree at
the base of the Palatine, found by a she-wolf, and suckled by her in
her cave nearby. They were rescued by Faustulus and his wife Acca
Larentia, who raised them to manhood. After deposing Amulius and
putting their grandfather back on his throne, the twins founded a
settlement on the Palatine. Once its walls were built, Remus jumped
over them and was put to death by Romulus, apparently for sacrilege.
Romulus then set out to acquire subjects to live in his town, which
he did in respect of males by establishing an asylum in the
depression between the two humps of the Capitol, there collecting
refugees who seem to have been criminals. Female citizens he acquired
by tricking the Sabines of the Quirinal into bringing their women to
a feast and then kidnapping them as wives for his men. Romulus ruled
for a long time. Then one day he went hunting in the Goat Swamps of
the Campus Martius and was caught in a terrible storm; when he didn't
come home, it was believed that he had been taken by the gods and
made an immortal.
rostra
The plural form of "rostrum," meaning a ship's bronze or
reinforced oaken beak. This fierce object jutted well forward of the
bows just below the level of the water, and was used to hole an enemy
ship in the maneuver called "ramming." When in 338 B.C. the consul
Gaius Maenius attacked the Volscian fleet in Antium harbor, he
defeated it completely. To mark the end of the Volsci as a rival
power to Rome, Maenius removed the beaks of the ships he had sent to
the bottom or captured and fixed them to the Forum wall of the
speaker's platform tucked into the well of the Comitia. Ever after,
the speaker's platform was known as the rostra—the ships' beaks.
Rubico
River Also known as the Rubicon, it was the river which
formed the boundary between Italian Gaul and peninsular Italy on the
eastern side of the Apennines (the Arnus did the same thing to the
west). No one today is sure which modern river is the antique Rubico;
scholarly opinion favors a very short and uninspiring stream now
called the Rubicone. I beg to differ. Surely the Rubico was that
river which had its source in closest proximity to the source of the
Arnus? Ancient boundaries wherever possible were visible phenomena—
otherwise, why have the border of Italian Gaul follow the contour of
the huge loop in the Arnus? I contend that the Rubico was not a short
little coastal stream, but a long river with its source high enough
up in the Apennines to give it a respectable volume of water in its
bed as well as the necessary proximity to the source of the Arnus. My
pick is the modern Ronco, which enters the Adriatic between Ravenna
and Rimini (Ariminum) and rises very close to the Arnus. Why would a
people as sensible as the Romans choose a little coastal trickle as
the boundary when a much larger and longer river was in the vicinity?
Extensive drainage and canal work has been going on for so many
centuries around Ravenna that no one can be sure.
saepta
"The sheepfold." In Republican times, this was simply an
open area on the Campus Martius not far from the Via Lata, and in
proximity to the Villa Publica; it possessed no permanent buildings.
Here the comitia centuriata met in its centuries. As the Centuriate
Assembly normally called for a voting procedure, the saepta was
divided up for the occasion by temporary fences so that the Five
Classes could vote in their Centuries'.
sagum
The soldier's heavy-weather cape. It was made out of greasy
wool to make it as waterproof as possible, cut on the full circle
with a hole in its middle for the head to poke through, and came well
down the body for maximum protection; it was capacious enough to
cover the soldier's back-borne kit also. The best kind of sagum came
from Liguria, where the wool was exactly right for it.
saltatrix tonsa
"Barbered dancing-girl." That is, a male homosexual
who dressed as a woman and sold his sexual favors.
Samnium The territory lying between Latium, Campania, Apulia, and
Picenum. Most of Samnium was ruggedly mountainous and not
particularly fertile; its towns tended to be poor and small, and
numbered among them Bovianum, Caieta, and Aeclanum. Aesernia and
Beneventum, the two biggest towns, were Latin Rights communities
implanted in Samnite territory by Rome. The people of the general
area called Samnium were of several different nations—the Paeligni,
the Marrucini, the Vestini, and the Frentani each occupied a
different part, and the Samnites the rest. Throughout their history
Samnites
the
were implacable enemies of Rome, and several times
during the early and middle Republic inflicted crushing defeats on
Rome. However, they had neither the manpower nor the financial
resources to throw off the Roman yoke permanently. About 180 B.C. the
Samnites were sufficiently sapped of strength to prove incapable of
refusing a foreign race of settlers; to lessen Roman troubles in the
northwest, Rome shifted forty thousand Ligurians to Samnium. At the
time it had seemed to Rome an excellent idea, but the new settlers
were eventually fully absorbed into the Samnite nation—and harbored
no more love for Rome than their Samnite hosts. Thus Samnite
resistance grew afresh.
satrap
The title given by the Persian kings to their provincial or
territorial governors. Alexander the Great seized upon the term and
employed it, as did the later Arsacid kings of Parthia. The region
ruled by a satrap was called a satrapy.
Saturninus Lucius Appuleius
Saturninus was born about 135
B.C., of a respectable family with close links to Picenum (his sister
was married to the Picentine Titus Labienus, his colleague in his
last tribunate of the plebs). Elected quaestor for 104 B.C. , he was
given the job of looking after the grain supply and the port of
Ostia, only to be sacked from his position and expelled from the
Senate when Marcus Aemilius Scaurus the Princeps Senatus blamed him
for a premature increase in the price of grain. Saturninus didn't
take this disgrace lying down; he stood for election as a tribune of
the plebs for 103 B.C., and got in. During this first term as a
tribune of the plebs Saturninus allied himself with Gaius Marius, and
passed laws benefiting Marius, particularly one allocating land in
Africa for Marius's Jugurthine War veterans. He also passed a law
establishing a special court to try those accused of a crime he
called maiestas minuta— "little treason."
In 102 and 101 B.C. Saturninus was out of office, but
sufficiently obnoxious to irritate the censor Metellus Numidicus, who
tried to expel him from the Senate; the result was a riot in which
Metellus Numidicus was severely beaten about. He stood for a second
term as tribune of the plebs for 100 B.C., and was elected, still in
alliance with Marius. A second land bill, to settle Marius's veterans
from the war against the Germans on land in Gaul-across-the-Alps,
provoked huge fury in the Senate, but Saturninus went ahead and
procured it. The members of the Senate were required to swear an oath
to uphold the law; all swore except Metellus Numidicus, who elected
to pay a heavy fine and go into exile. From there on, Saturninus
became an increasing embarrassment for Marius, who sloughed him off,
his own reputation having suffered greatly.
Saturninus then began to woo the Head Count with promises of
grain; there was a famine at the time, and the Head Count was hungry.
When the elections for tribunes of the plebs for 99 B.C. were held,
Saturninus ran for a third term, and was defeated; his boon companion
Gaius Servilius Glaucia conveniently arranged that one of the
successful candidates be murdered, and Saturninus gained office to
replace the dead man. Stirred to the point of revolution, the Forum
crowds threatened the government of Rome sufficiently to spur Marius
and Scaurus into an alliance which produced the Senate's Ultimate
Decree. Saturninus and his friends were apprehended after Marius cut
off the water supply to the Capitol, where the group had taken
refuge. Put in the Senate House for safekeeping, they were stoned to
death by a rain of roof tiles. All of Saturninus's laws were then
annulled.
Scordisci
A tribal confederation of Celts admixed with Illyrians
and Thracians, the Scordisci lived in Moesia between the valley of
the Danubius and the Macedonian border. Powerful and warlike, they
plagued the Roman governors of Macedonia-perpetually.
Scythians
This people was probably of Germanic stock, and spoke an
Indo-European language. They lived in the Asian steppelands to the
east of the Tanais River, extending south as far as the Caucasus.
They were well organized enough socially to have kings, and were
fabled goldsmiths.
Senate
Properly, Senatus. The Romans believed that Romulus himself
founded the Senate by collecting one hundred patrician men into an
advisory body and giving them the title patres ("fathers"). However,
it is more likely that the Senate was an advisory body set up by the
later kings of Rome. When the Republic replaced the kings, the Senate
was retained, now comprising three hundred patricians. Scant years
later it contained plebeian senators also, though it took the
plebeians somewhat longer to attain the senior magistracies.
Because of the Senate's antiquity, legal definition of its powers,
rights, and duties were at best inadequate; it was an important
constituent of the mos maiorum. Membership of the Senate was for
life, which predisposed it toward the oligarchy it soon became.
Throughout its history, its members fought strenuously to preserve
their—as they saw it— natural pre-eminence. Under the Republic,
senators were appointed by (and could be expelled by) the censors.
There were thirty decuries of ten senators each, the decury being led
by a patrician—which meant that there always had to be a minimum of
thirty patrician senators in the Senate. By the time of Marius and
Sulla it was customary to demand that a senator have property
bringing him in at least a million sesterces a year, though during
the entire life of the Republic this was never a formal law. Like
much else, it simply was.
Senators alone were entitled to wear the latus clavus or broad
stripe on their tunics; they wore closed shoes of maroon leather, and
a ring which had originally been made of iron, but came to be of
gold. Meetings of the Senate had to be held in properly inaugurated
premises. The Senate had its own meeting-house, the Curia Hostilia,
but often chose to assemble elsewhere. The ceremonies and meeting of
New Year's Day, for example, were held in the temple of Jupiter
Optimus Maximus, while meetings to discuss war were held outside the
pomerium in the temple of Bellona. Sessions could only go on between
sunrise and sunset, and could not take place on days when any of the
Comitia met, though could take place on a comitial day if no Comitia
meeting was convoked.
There was a rigid hierarchy among those allowed to speak in
senatorial meetings, with the Princeps Senatus at the top of the list
at the time of Marius and Sulla; patricians always preceded plebeians
of exactly the same status otherwise. Not all members of the House
were allowed the privilege of speaking. The senatores pedarii (I have
used a British parliamentary term, backbenchers, to describe them, as
they sat behind those permitted to speak) were allowed to vote only,
not to speak. No restrictions were placed upon a man's oration in
terms of length of time or germane content— hence the popularity of
the technique now called filibustering—talking a motion out. If the
issue was unimportant or the response completely unanimous, voting
could be by voice or a show of hands, but a formal vote took place by
division of the House, meaning that the senators left their stations
and grouped themselves to either side of the curule dais according to
their yea or nay, and were then physically counted. An advisory
rather than a true legislating body always, the Senate issued its
consulta or decrees as requests to the various Comitia. If the issue
was serious, a quorum had to be present before a vote could be taken,
though we do not know the precise number of senators who constituted
a quorum—perhaps a quarter? Certainly most meetings were not heavily
attended, as there was no rule which said a senator had to attend
meetings on a regular basis.
In certain areas the Senate traditionally reigned supreme,
despite its lack of legislating power: the fiscus was controlled by
the Senate, as it controlled the Treasury; foreign affairs were left
to the Senate; war was the business of the Senate; and the
appointment of provincial governors and the regulation of provincial
affairs were left to the Senate to decide. After the time of Gaius
Gracchus, in civil emergencies the Senate could override all other
bodies in government by passing the Senatus Consultant de republica
defendenda— its Ultimate Decree proclaiming its own sovereignty and
the establishment of martial law. The Ultimate Decree, in other
words, was a senatorial sidestep to prevent the appointment of a
dictator.
Servian Walls
Murus Servii Tullii. Republican Romans believed
that the formidable walls enclosing the city of Rome had been erected
in the time of King Servius Tullius. However, evidence suggests that
they were built after Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 B.C. (see
Juno Moneta). Down to the time of Caesar the Dictator they were
scrupulously kept up.
sesterces
Latin singular, sestertius. The commonest of Roman
coins. Roman accounting practices were expressed in sesterces, hence
their prominence in Latin writings of Republican date. The name
sestertius derives from semis tertius, meaning two and a half ases
(see as). In Latin writing, it was abbreviated as HS. A small silver
coin, the sestertius was worth a quarter of a denarius. I have kept
to the Latin when speaking of this coin in the singular, but have
preferred to used the Anglicized form in the plural.
Sibylline Books
The Roman State possessed a series of prophecies
written in Greek and called the Sibylline Books. They were acquired,
it was believed, by King Tarquinius Priscus, at which date they were
written on palm leaves; each time the King refused to buy them, one
book was burned and the price for the rest went up until finally the
King agreed to take the remainder. They were greatly revered and were
in the care of a special college of minor priests called the
decemviri sacris faciundis; in State crises they were solemnly
consulted to see if there was a prophecy which fitted the situation.
sinus A
pronounced curve or fold. The term was used in many
different ways, but for the purposes of this book, two only are of
interest. One described the geographical feature we might call a
gulf—Sinus Arabicus, et cetera. The second described the looping fold
of toga as this garment emerged from under the right arm and was
swept up over the left shoulder—the togate Roman's pocket.
Sosius
A name associated with the book trade in Rome. Two brothers
Sosius published during the principate of Augustus. I have taken the
name and extrapolated it backward in time; Roman businesses were
often family businesses, and the book trade in Rome was already a
flourishing one at the time of Marius and Sulla. Therefore, why not a
Sosius?
spelt A very fine, soft white flour. It was not suitable for making
bread, but was excellent for making cakes. It was ground from the
variety of wheat now known as Triticum spelta.
sponsio
In cases of civil litigation not calling for a hearing in
a formal court of law (that is, cases which could be heard by the
urban praetor), the urban praetor could only proceed to hear the case
if a sum of money called sponsio was lodged in his keeping before the
hearing began. This was either damages, or the sum of money in
dispute. In bankruptcy complaints or nonpayment of debts, the sum
owed was the sponsio. This meant that when the sum concerned could
not be found by either the plaintiff or the defendant, the urban
praetor was not empowered to hear the case. In times of money
shortage, it became a problem, hence the inclusion by Sulla in his
law regulating debt of a provision waiving the lodgement of sponsio
with the urban praetor.
steel
The term Iron Age is rather misleading, as iron in itself is
not a very usable metal. It only replaced bronze when ancient smiths
discovered ways of steeling it; from then on, it was the metal of
choice for tools, weapons, and other apparatus demanding a
combination of hardness, durability and capacity to take an edge or
point. Aristotle and Theophrastus, both writing in the Greece of the
fourth century B.C., talk about steel, not about iron. However, the
whole process of working iron into a usable metal evolved in total
ignorance of the chemistry and metallurgy underlying it. The main ore
used to extract iron was haematite; pyrites was little used because
of the extreme toxicity of its sulphuric by-products. Strabo and
Pliny the Elder both describe a method of roasting the ore in a
hearth-type furnace (oxidation), and the shaft furnace (reduction).
The shaft furnace was more efficient, could smelt larger quantities
of ore, and was the method of choice. The carbon necessary for
smelting was provided (as with bronze and other alloys) by charcoal.
Most smelting works used both hearth and shaft furnaces side by side,
and produced from the raw ore slag-contaminated "blooms" which were
called sows (hence, presumably, our term "pig"). These sows were then
reheated to above melting point and compelled to take up additional
carbon from the charcoal by hammering (forging); this also drove out
most of the contaminating slag, though ancient steels were never
entirely free of slag. Roman smiths were fully conversant with the
techniques of annealing, quenching, tempering, and cementation (this
last forced yet more carbon into the iron). Each of these procedures
changed the characteristics of the basic carbon steel in a different
way, so that steels for various purposes could be made—razors, sword
blades, knives, axes, saws, wood and stone chisels, cold chisels,
nails, spikes, et cetera. So precious were the steels suitable for
cutting edges that a thin piece of edge steel was welded (the Romans
knew two methods of welding, pressure welding and fusion welding)
onto a cheaper-quality base, as seen with ploughshares and axes.
However, the Roman sword blade was made entirely from steel taking a
cruelly sharp edge; it was produced by tempering at about 280°C.
Tongs, anvils, hammers, bellows, crucibles, fire bricks, and the
other tools in trade of a smith were known and universally used. Many
of the ancient theories were quite wrong; it was thought, for
instance, that the nature of the liquid used in quenching affected
the quenching—urine was the quenching liquid of choice. And no one
understood that the real reason why the iron mined in
Noricum produced such superb steel lay in the fact that it naturally
contained a small amount of manganese uncontaminated by phosphorus,
arsenic, or sulphur, and therefore was modern manganese steel.
stibium
A black antimony-based powder soluble in water, stibium
was used to dye or paint eyebrows and eyelashes, and to draw a line
around the eyes.
stips A
wage. In the sense used in this book, the slips was the wage
paid to a slave by his master. It was also called peculium.
Subura
The poorest and most densely populated part of the city of
Rome. It lay to the east of the Forum Romanum in the declivity
between the Oppian spur of the Esquiline Mount and the Viminal Hill.
Its very long main street had three different names: at the bottom,
where it was contiguous with the Argiletum, it was the Fauces
Suburae; the next section was known as the Subura Major; and the
final section, which scrambled up the steep flank of the Esquiline
proper, was the Clivus Suburanus. The Subura Minor and the Vicus
Patricii branched off the Subura Major in the direction of the
Viminal. The Subura was an area composed entirely of insulae and
contained only one prominent landmark, the Tunis Mamilia, apparently
some kind of tower. Its people were notoriously polyglot and
independent of mind; many Jews lived in the Subura, which at the time
of Marius and Sulla contained Rome's only synagogue. Suetonius says
Caesar the Dictator lived in the Subura.
suffect consul
Consul suffectus. When an elected consul died in
office or was in some other way rendered incapable of conducting the
duties of his office, the Senate appointed a substitute called the
suffectus. He was not elected. Sometimes the Senate-would appoint a
suffectus even when the consular year was just about over; at other
times no substitute would be appointed even when the consular year
was far from over. These discrepancies apparently reflected the mood
of the House at the particular time. It seems too that the Senate
needed the presence of the remaining consul to appoint a suffectus—
witness senatorial helplessness when Cato the Consul was killed in 90
B.C. and the remaining consul, Lucius Julius Caesar, refused to come
to Rome for the choosing of a suffectus. The name of the suffect
consul was engraved upon the consular fasti, and he was entitled to
call himself a consular after his period in office was over.
sumptuary law
A lex sumptuaria. These laws sought to regulate
the amount of luxurious (that is, expensive) goods and/or foodstuffs
a Roman might buy or have in his house, no matter how wealthy he was.
Presumably the goods targeted were imported from abroad. During the
Republic many sumptuary laws were leveled at women, forbidding them
to wear more than a specified amount of jewelry, or ride in litters
or carriages within the Servian Walls; as several magistrates found
out, women so legislated against were inclined to turn nasty and
become a force to be reckoned with.
suovetaurilia
This was a special sacrifice consisting of a pig
(su), a sheep (ove), and an ox or bull (taur). It was offered to
certain gods on critical occasions; Jupiter Optimus Maximus was one,
Mars another. The ceremonies surrounding the suovetaurilia called for
the sacrificial victims to be led in a solemn procession before being
killed. Besides these special occasions of national crisis, there
were two regular occasions on which a suovetaurilia was offered; the
first occurred in late May when the land was purified by the twelve
minor priests called the Arval Brethren; the second occurred at fiveyear intervals when the censors set up their booth on the Campus
Martius and prepared to take the full census of Roman citizens.
tablinum
This room was the exclusive domain of the paterfamilias
in a Roman family unit; unless too poor to have more than one or two
rooms, he had his study, as I have chosen to call it.
talent
This ancient unit of weight was defined as the load a man
could carry. Bullion and very large sums of money were expressed in
talents, but the term was not confined to precious metals and money.
In modern terms the talent weighed about fifty to fifty-five pounds
(25 kilograms). A talent of gold weighed the same as a talent of
silver, of course, but was far more valuable.
Tarpeian Rock
Its precise location is still hotly debated, but
it is known to have been quite visible from the lower Forum Romanum,
and presumably was an overhang at the top of the Capitolium cliffs.
Since the drop was not much more than eighty feet from the Tarpeian
Rock to the bottom, the rock itself must have been located precisely
above some sort of jagged outcrop—we have no evidence that anyone
survived the fall. It was the traditional place of execution for
Roman citizen traitors and murderers, who were either thrown from it
or forced to jump from it. I have located it on a line from the
temple of Ops.
tata
The Latin diminutive for "father"—akin to our "daddy." I have,
by the way, elected to use the almost universal "mama" as the
diminutive for mother, but the Latin was "mamma."
Tellus The
Roman earth goddess. Her worship became largely neglected
after the importation of Magna Mater from Pessinus. Tellus had a big
temple on the Carinae, in early days imposing; by the time of Marius
and Sulla it was dilapidated.
Tiddlypuss, Lucius
I needed a joke name of the kind people in
all places at all times have used when they want to refer to a
faceless yet representative person. In the USA it would be "Joe
Blow," in the UK "Fred Bloggs." As I am writing in standard English
for a largely non-Latinate readership, it was not possible to choose
a properly Latin name to fulfill this function. I coined "Lucius
Tiddlypuss" because it looks and sounds patently ridiculous, has an
"uss" ending—and because of a mountain. This mountain was named in a
Latin distortion after the villa of Augustus's infamous freedman,
Publius Vedius Pollio, which lay on its flanks. The villa's name, a
Greek one, was Pausilypon, whereas the Latin name of the mountain was
Pausilypus— a clear indication of how much Pollio was loathed, for
pus then meant exactly the same as' 'pus'' does today in English.
Speakers of Latin punned constantly, as we know. And that's how
Lucius Tiddlypuss came into being, one of the few fictitious
characters in this book.
toga
The garment only a full citizen of Rome was permitted to wear.
Made of lightweight wool, it was a most peculiar shape (which is why
the togate "Romans" in Hollywood movies never look right). After
exhaustive and brilliant experimentation, Dr. Lillian Wilson of Johns
Hopkins worked out a size and shape which produce a perfect-looking
toga. To fit a man five feet nine inches (175 cm) tall and having a
waist of thirty-six inches (89.5 cm), the toga was about fifteen feet
(4.6 m) wide, and seven feet six inches (2.25 m) long; the length
measurement is draped on his height axis while the much bigger width
measurement is wrapped around him. However, the shape was not a
simple rectangle! It looked like this:
[GC 1068.jpg]
Unless the toga is cut as illustrated, it will absolutely refuse to
drape the way it does on the togate men of the ancient statues. The
Republican toga of Marius and Sulla's day was very large (the toga
varied considerably in size between the time of the Kings of Rome and
500 A.D., a period of one thousand years). One final observation
about the toga resulted from my own experimentation—I proved rather
conclusively that the togate Republican Roman could not possibly have
worn under-drawers or a loincloth. The toga itself disqualified the
left hand from performing any task at groin level, as the left arm
carried multiple folds and most of the weight of the garment. But
when the toga is properly draped, the right hand can part it with
astonishing ease, push up the hem of the tunic, and perform the act
of urinating from a standing position—provided, that is, that there
are no under-drawers or loincloth to fiddle with! I mention this
interesting fact only because it is still said the Roman wore some
sort of nether under-garment. Well, if he was wearing a toga, he
couldn't have.
toga alba
Or toga pura, or toga virilis. This was the plain white
toga of manhood as worn by an ordinary citizen. It was probably more
cream or ecru than stark white.
toga Candida
This was the specially whitened toga worn by those
seeking office as an elected magistrate (our word "candidate" comes
from the toga Candida). The candidate wore his special toga on the
day when he registered his candidacy, as he went about Rome
canvassing, and on election day. Its stark whiteness was achieved by
bleaching the garment in the sun for many days, and then working
finely powdered chalk through it.
toga picta
The all-purple toga of the triumphing general, lavishly
embroidered (presumably in gold) with pictures of people and events.
The kings of Rome had worn the purple toga picta, and so too did the
statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus in his temple on the Capitol.
toga praetexta
The purple-bordered toga of the curule magistrate,
it continued to be worn by these men after their term in office was
over. It was also the garment worn by children of both sexes.
toga pulla This was the toga of mourning, and was made of wool as
close to black as possible. Senators in mourning also wore a knight's
tunic bearing the angustus clavus, or "narrow stripe," on its
shoulder.
toga trabea
Cicero's "particolored toga." It was the striped toga
of the augur, and very likely the pontifex also. Like the toga
praetexta, it had a purple border, but also was striped in alternate
red and purple down its length.
togate
The correct English-language term to describe a man clad in
his toga.
tribe Tribus.
By the beginning of the Republic, tribus to a Roman
was not an ethnic grouping of his people, but a political grouping of
service only to the State. There were thirty-five tribes altogether;
thirty-one of these were rural, only four urban. The sixteen really
old tribes bore the names of the various original patrician gentes,
indicating that the citizens who belonged to these tribes were either
members of the patrician families, or had once lived on land owned by
the patrician families. During the early and middle Republic, when
Roman-owned territory in the Italian peninsula began to expand,
tribes were added to accommodate the new citizens within the Roman
body politic. Full Roman citizen colonies also became the nuclei of
fresh tribes. The four urban tribes were supposed to have been
founded by King Servius Tullius, though the time of their actual
foundation is more likely to have been during the early Republic. The
last date of a tribal creation was 241 B.C. Every member of a tribe
was entitled to register one vote in a tribal assembly; but his vote
was not in itself significant. The votes in each tribe were counted
first, then the tribe as a whole cast one single vote, the majority
vote within the ranks of its members. This meant that in no tribal
assembly could the huge number of citizens enrolled in the four urban
tribes
influence the outcome of a vote, as each of the thirty-one rural
tribes had the exact same degree of voting power as each urban tribe.
Members of rural tribes were not disbarred from living within the
city of Rome, nor were their progeny forced into an urban tribe. Most
senators and knights of the First Class belonged to rural tribes.
tribune Tribunus.
An official representing the interests of a
certain part of the Roman body politic. The name originally referred
to those men who represented the tribes (tri-bus—tribunus), but, as
the Republic got into its stride, the name came to mean an official
representing various institutions not directly connected with the
tribes per se.
tribune, military Those on the general's staff who were not elected
tribunes of the soldiers, yet who ranked below legate but above
cadet. If the general was not a consul currently in office, military
tribunes might command his legions. Otherwise they did staff duties
for the general. Military tribunes also served as commanders of
cavalry units.
tribune of the plebs
These magistrates came into being early in
the Republic, when the Plebs was at complete loggerheads with the
patricians. Elected by the tribal body of plebeians formed as the
concilium plebis or comitia plebis tributa or Plebeian Assembly, they
took an oath to defend the lives and property of members of the
Plebs. By 450 B.C. there were ten tribunes of the plebs. By the time
of Marius and Sulla these ten tribunes of the plebs had proven
themselves a thorn in the side of the Senate rather than merely the
patricians—and even though, by this time, they were themselves
members of the Senate. A lex Atinia de tribunis plebis in senatum
legendis of 149 B.C. had made tribunes of the plebs automatically
members of the Senate upon election. Because they were not elected by
the Whole People (that is, by patricians as well as plebeians), they
had no power under Rome's unwritten constitution and were not
magistrates in the same way as tribunes of the soldiers, quaestors,
curule aediles, praetors, consuls, and censors; their magistracies
were of the Plebs and their power in office resided in the oath the
whole Plebs took to defend the sacrosanctity—the inviolability—of its
elected tribunes. That the tribunes of the plebs were called tribunes
was possibly due to the tribal organization of the Plebeian Assembly.
The power of the tribunate of the plebs lay in the right of its
officers to exercise a veto against almost any aspect of government:
a tribune of the plebs could veto the actions or laws of his nine
fellow tribunes, or any—or all!—other magistrates, including consuls
and censors (witness how in 109 B.C. the censor Marcus Aemilius
Scaurus, who had defied attempts to remove him from his office,
yielded immediately when the tribune of the plebs Mamilius interposed
his veto); he could veto the holding of an election; he could veto
the passing of lex or plebiscitum; and he could veto decrees of the
Senate, even in war and foreign affairs. Only a dictator (and perhaps
an interrex) was not subject to the tribunician veto. Within his own
Plebeian Assembly, the tribune of the plebs could even exercise the
death penalty if his right to proceed in his duties was denied him.
During the early and middle years of the Republic, tribunes of
the plebs were not members of the Senate. Then came the lex Atinia of
149 B.C., which meant that election as a tribune of the plebs became
a way of entering the Senate without being approved by the censors;
from that time on, men who had been expelled from the Senate by the
censors often sought election as tribunes of the plebs in order to
get back in again. The tribune of the plebs had no imperium, and the
authority vested in the office did not extend past the first
milestone. Custom dictated that a man serve only one term as a
tribune of the plebs, entering office on the tenth day of December
for one year. But custom was not legally binding, as Gaius Sempronius
Gracchus proved when he successfully sought a second term in 122B.C.
The real power of the office was vested in the sacrosanctitas
(inviolability) of its holders, and intercessio, the right to
interpose a veto. Tribunician contribution to government was in
consequence more often obstructive than constructive.
tribune of the soldiers
Two dozen young men, aged between about
twenty-five and twenty-nine years, were elected each year by the
Assembly of the (whole) People to serve as tribuni militum, or
military tribunes. As they were elected by the Whole People, they
were true magistrates. They were the legally elected officers of the
consul's legions (four legions belonged to the consuls in office),
and were posted to command them, six per legion. At times when the
consuls had more than six legions in the field (as at Arausio) the
tribunes of the soldiers were rationed out between them, not always
equally in numbers per legion.
tribune of the Treasury Tribuni aerarii.
There is a great
deal of mystery about who the tribuni aerarii actually were.
Originally they definitely were the army's paymasters, but by the
middle of the Republic this task had been assumed by the quaestors.
Yet at the time of Marius and Sulla, tribuni aerarii were numerous
enough (and wealthy enough) to qualify for the Second Class in the
Centuriate Assembly, having a census economic status not far inferior
to the knights' minimum. Perhaps they were men descended from the
original tribuni aerarii who simply clung to their old status to
prove their antiquity. However, more likely, I think, that they were
senior civil servants attached to the Treasury. Though the Senate and
People of Rome frowned heavily upon bureaucracy and strenuously
resisted any growth in numbers of public employees, there can be no
doubt that once Rome's territorial possessions began to increase, one
branch of the SPQR must have demanded more and more public officials
of unelected nature. This branch was the Treasury (the aerarium). By
the late Republic there must have been a fairly large number of
senior civil servants administering the many departments and duties
attached to the Treasury (and this increased dramatically after the
time of Marius and Sulla). Money had to be exacted for many different
taxes, at home and abroad; and money had to be found for everything
from the purchase of public grain, to censors' building programs, to
the army's pay, to minutiae like purchases of the urban praetor's
pigs distributed throughout Rome at the Compitalia. While no doubt an
elected magistrate issued orders about any or all of these items, he
certainly did not concern himself with the mechanics implementing his
orders. For these, there had to have been senior civil servants, men
whose rank was distinctly higher than clerk or scribe; they probably
came from respectable families and were probably well paid. The
existence of a class of them can definitely be supposed at the time
Cato Uticensis (in 64 B.C.) made such a nuisance of himself when
appointed Treasury quaestor, for it was glaringly obvious that many
years had elapsed since Treasury quaestors concerned themselves
personally with the Treasury—and by 64 B.C. the Treasury was huge.
triclinium
The dining room. By preference the family dining room
was square in shape, and possessed three couches arranged to form a
U. Standing in the doorway one looked into the hollow of the U; the
couch on the left was called the lectus summits, the couch forming
the middle or bottom of the U was the lectus medius, and the couch
forming the right side was the lectus imus. Each couch was very
broad, perhaps four or more feet (1.25 m), and at least twice that
long. One end of the couch had a raised arm forming a head, the other
end did not. In front of the couches, a little lower than the height
of the couches, was a narrow table also forming a U. The male diners
reclined on their left elbows, supported by bolsters; they were not
shod, and could call for their feet to be washed. The host of the
dinner reclined at the left end of the lectus medius, this being the
bottom or armless end of it; the right-hand end of the same couch—its
head—was the place where the most honored guest reclined, and was
called the locus consularis. At the time of Marius and Sulla it was
rare for women to recline alongside-the men unless the dinner party
was a men's party and the women invited of low virtue. The women of
the family sat on upright chairs inside the double U of couches and
table; they entered the room with the first course and left as soon
as the last course was cleared away. Normally they drank only -water,
as women drinking wine were "loose."
[GC 1073.jpg]
triumph
The greatest of days for the successful general was the
day upon which he triumphed. By the time of Marius and Sulla, a
general had to have been hailed on the field as imperator by his
troops, after which he was obliged to petition the Senate to grant
him his triumph; only the Senate could sanction it, and sometimes—
though not often—unjustifiably withheld it. The triumph itself was a
most imposing parade consisting of musicians, dancers, wagons filled
with spoils, floats depicting scenes from the campaign, the Senate in
procession, prisoners and liberated Romans, and the army. The parade
began in the Villa Publica on the Campus Martius, and followed a
prescribed route thereafter—a special gate in the Servian Walls
called the Porta Triumphalis, into the Velabrum, the Forum Boarium,
and the Circus Maximus, after which it went down the Via Triumphalis
and turned-into the Via Sacra of the Forum Romanum. It terminated on
the Capitol at the foot of the steps of the temple of Jupiter Optimus
Maximus. The triumphing general and his lictors went into the temple
and offered the god their laurels of victory, after which a triumphal
feast was held in the temple.
triumphator The name given
tunic Tunica. The tunic was
to the triumphing general.
the basic item of clothing for almost
all ancient Mediterranean peoples, including the Greeks and the
Romans. As worn by a Roman of the time of Marius and Sulla, the
tunic's body was rectangular in shape, without darts to confine it at
the sides of the chest; the neck was probably cut on a curve for
comfort rather than kept as a straight edge contiguous with the
shoulders. The sleeves may have been woven as rectangular projections
from the shoulders, or they may have been set in. It was not beyond
the skill of ancient tailors to set in sleeves, and some people wore
long sleeves, which had to be set in. The statues do not indicate
that the tunics of men important enough to have statues were simply
joined up the sides with a gap left at the top for the arms to go
through. The sleeves of the tunics shown on statues of generals in
particular look like proper short sleeves. The tunic was either
belted with leather or girdled with a cord; the Roman tunic was
always worn longer at the front than at the back by about three
inches (75 mm). Those of the knight's census wore a narrow purple
stripe down the right side of the tunic, those of the senator's
census a wide purple stripe. The stripe may also have run down the
left side of the tunic as well. I do not believe the stripe was a
single one at mid-chest. A wall painting from Pompeii displaying a
man wearing the toga praetexta shows a wide purple stripe going down
the tunic from the right shoulder.
Tusculum A town on the Via Latina some fifteen miles from Rome. It
was the first Latin town to receive the Roman citizenship, in 381
B.C., and was always unswervingly loyal to Rome. Cato the Censor came
from Tusculum, where his family had possessed the Public Horse of
Roman knighthood for at least three generations.
Vaticanus
Both a plain, the Campus Vaticanus, and a hill, the Mons
Vaticanus. They lay on the northern bank of the Tiber opposite the
Campus Martius. At the time of Marius and Sulla, the plain was used
for market gardening, the hill behind it for no published purpose.
Venus Libitina
Goddess of the life force, Venus had many aspects.
Venus Libitina was concerned with the extinction of the life force.
An underworld deity of great importance in Rome, her temple was
located outside the Servian Walls, more or less at the central point
of Rome's vast necropolis on the Campus Esquilinus. Its exact
location is not known, but since I had to site it somewhere, I put it
at the crossroads where the Via Labicana intersected with two
important diverticula (ring roads). The temple precinct was large for
a Roman temple, and had a grove of trees, presumably cypresses
(associated with death). In this precinct Rome's undertakers and
funeral directors had their headquarters, presumably operating from
stalls or booths. The temple itself contained a register of Roman
citizen deaths and was rich, thanks to the accumulation of the coins
which had to be paid to register a death. Should there be no consul
to employ them, the fasces of the consul were deposited on a special
couch inside the temple; the axes which were inserted into his fasces
only when he left the city were also kept in the temple. I imagine
that Rome's burial clubs, of which there were many, were connected in
some way to Venus Libitina.
Vesta
A very old Roman goddess of numinous nature, having no
mythology and no image. She was the hearth, and so had particular
importance within the family unit and the home, where she was
worshipped alongside the Di Penates and the Lar Familiaris. Her
official, public cult was equally important, and was personally
supervised by the Pontifex Maximus. Her temple in the Forum Romanum
was very small, very old, and round in shape; it was adjacent to the
Regia, the Well of Juturna and the residence of the Pontifex Maximus.
A fire burned in the temple permanently, and could not be allowed to
go out.
Vestal Virgins
Vesta had her own priesthood, the college of six
women called the Vestal Virgins. They were inducted at about seven or
eight years of age, took vows of complete chastity, and served the
goddess for thirty years, after which they were released from their
vows and sent back into the community at large. Their service over,
they could marry if they wished—though few did, as it was thought
unlucky. Their chastity was Rome's luck; that is, the luck of the
State. When a Vestal was deemed unchaste she was not judged and
punished out of hand, but was formally brought to trial in a
specially convened court. Her alleged lovers were also tried, but in
a different court. If convicted, she was cast into an underground
chamber dug for the purpose; it was sealed over, and she was left
there to die. In Republican times the Vestal Virgins lived in the
same State house as the Pontifex Maximus, though sequestered from
him.
vexillum
A flag or banner. via A main highway, road, or street.
villa A country residence, completely self-contained, and originally
having an agricultural purpose—in other words, a farmstead. It was
built around a peristyle or courtyard, had stables or farm buildings
at its front, and the main dwelling at its back. Wealthy Romans of
the late Republic began to build villas as vacation homes rather than
as farmsteads, considerably changing the architectural nature (and
grandeur) of the villa. Many holiday villas were on the seashore.
vir militaris
See Military Man.
voting Roman voting was timocratic, in that the power of the vote was
powerfully influenced by property status, and in that voting was not
"one man, one vote" in style. Whether an individual voted in the
Centuries or in the Tribes, his own personal vote could only
influence the verdict of the Century or the Tribe in which he polled.
Election outcomes were determined by the number of Century or Tribal
votes going a particular way. Juridical voting was different. On a
jury an individual did have a direct say in the outcome, as the jury
contained an odd number of men and the decision was a majority one,
not an unanimous one. It was timocratic, however, as a man of little
property had little chance of jury duty.
Wooden Bridge
The name always given to the Pons Sublicius, the
oldest of the bridges spanning the Tiber at the city of Rome.
yoke The yoke was the crossbeam or tie which rested upon the necks of
a pair of oxen or other animals in harness to draw a load. In human
terms, it came to mean the mark of servility, of submission to the
superiority and domination of others. There was a yoke for the young
of both sexes to pass beneath inside the city of Rome, located
somewhere on the Carinae; it was called the Tigillum, and perhaps
signified submission to the seriousness of adult life. However, it
was in military circumstances that the yoke came to have its greatest
metaphorical significance. Very early Roman (or perhaps Etruscan)
armies forced a defeated enemy to pass beneath the yoke; two spears
were planted upright in the ground, and a third spear was placed from
one top to the other to form a crosstie—the whole was too low for a
man to pass beneath walking erect, he had to bend right over. Other
peoples within Italy also adopted the custom, with the result that
from time to time a Roman army was forced to pass beneath the yoke.
To acquiesce to this was an intolerable humiliation; so much so, that
the Senate and People back in Rome usually preferred to see an army
stand and fight until the last man was dead, rather than sacrifice
honor and dignitas by surrendering and passing beneath the yoke.