The imperial regime was a loss for the Romans, but a deliverance for their subjects:  it abased the conquerors and raised the vanquished, reconciling them and preparing them for assimilation in the empire.

SOCIAL LIFE UNDER THE EMPIRE

=Moral Decay Continues at Rome.=—­Seneca in his Letters and Juvenal in his Satires have presented portraits of the men and women of their time so striking that the corruption of the Rome of the Caesars has remained proverbial.  They were not only the disorders left over from the republic—­the gross extravagance of the rich, the ferocity of masters against their slaves, the unbridled frivolity of women.  The evil did not arise with the imperial regime, but resulted from the excessive accumulation of the riches of the world in the hands of some thousands of nobles or upstarts, under whom lived some hundreds of free men in poverty, and slaves by millions subjected to an unrestrained oppression.  Each of these great proprietors lived in the midst of his slaves like a petty prince, indolent and capricious.  His house at Rome was like a palace; every morning the hall of honor (the atrium) was filled with clients, citizens who came for a meagre salary to salute the master[151] and escort him in the street.  For fashion required that a rich man should never appear in public unless surrounded by a crowd; Horace ridicules a praetor who traversed the streets of Tibur with only five slaves in his following.  Outside Rome the great possessed magnificent villas at the sea-shore or in the mountains; they went from one to the other, idle and bored.

These great families were rapidly extinguished.  Alarmed at the diminishing number of free men, Augustus had made laws to encourage marriage and to punish celibacy.  As one might expect, his laws did not remedy the evil.  There were so many rich men who had not married that it had become a lucrative trade to flatter them in order to be mentioned in their will; by having no children one could surround himself with a crowd of flatterers.  “In the city,” says a Roman story-teller, “all men divide themselves into two classes, those who fish, and those who are angled for.”  “Losing his children augments the influence of a man.”

=The Shows.=—­In the life of this idle people of Rome the spectacles held a place that we are now hardly able to conceive.  They were, as in Greece, games, that is to say, religious ceremonies.  The games proceeded throughout the day and again on the following day, and this for a week at least.  The amphitheatre was, as it were, the rendezvous of the whole free population; it was there that they manifested themselves.  Thus in 196, during the civil wars, all the spectators cried with one voice, “Peace!” The spectacle was the passion of the time.  Three emperors appeared in public, Caligula as a driver, Nero as an actor, Commodus as a gladiator.

=The Theatre.=—­There were three sorts of spectacles:  the theatre, the circus, and the amphitheatre.