A Writer's People (18 page)

I
N
55
BC
, when Caesar was dealing with an incursion of Germans across the Rhine; when (to impress the local people) he built and dismantled a bridge over the river; and when he also went on a reconnoitring expedition to Britain; in that busy year for Caesar, Pompey, Caesar's ally and rival, inaugurated his theatre in Rome. It was the first stone theatre in the city. These great Roman generals made money: Pompey had done in the Roman east what Caesar was doing in Gaul.

Building the theatre was not the end of Pompey's expenses. He wished to inaugurate his theatre with five days of animal-hunt shows, two shows a day. That would have cost a great deal of money: assembling the wild animals and their keepers from all parts of the Roman world, transporting them to
Rome, feeding them and keeping them fit until the day of the show, when they were taken up to the arena, to face the long spears of the men who, though one or two might be mangled, were going to kill them. The animals, penned up for many weeks, would have known in the arena, when they saw themselves hedged by the long spears, that they were going to die. Enraged then, they would have thrown themselves on the spear. This was the moment the Roman crowd went to see.

Cicero, the orator-statesman and philosopher, went to all five days of the “games.” He wrote to a literary friend in Pompeii about them. The friend was an invalid and was sorry to have missed the great occasion. Cicero wrote to comfort him; and though he thought it wasn't the right thing for him to do, Cicero couldn't help expressing admiration for the big show over which his ally Pompey had taken such trouble and spent so much of his new fortune. Rome in fact had never seen anything like Pompey's games; twice in his letter Cicero said that the games were magnificent. But he knew that a little more was expected of him, and as “a man of culture” he affected a world-weariness about these shows of blood, in which both men and animals died. What pleasure was it, he said, to see a puny human being mangled by a powerful wild animal? And what pleasure to see a splendid animal impaled on a big hunting spear? It might be something to see, as people said; but his friend in Pompeii had seen it all before anyway, and for Cicero himself there was nothing new.

But he went to all the five days, and perhaps (in spite of a law case) twice a day. The last day was the day of the elephants. It was the big day; and now Cicero writes strangely.
The “mob and crowd” were very impressed but didn't express pleasure. The feeling in the theatre was, rather, that the mighty elephant had an affinity with men.

What was Cicero trying to say, or trying not to say? A note in the Loeb translation refers us to Pliny the Elder, who said in his
Natural History
that there were twenty elephants in Pompey's games, and their cries, as they were being speared to death, troubled the Roman audience, who rose and cursed Pompey. Pliny died in the big eruption of Vesuvius in ad 79; so he could not have been an eyewitness of Pompey's games in 55
BC
. He was perhaps only recording what might have become a folk memory of the games when, unusually, the Roman arena crowd objected to blood. Cicero could have spoken more plainly. He could have told us more. But he was a friend of Pompey's; he would not have wanted to diminish the event; and so, like Caesar in Gaul, he preferred to use words to hide from what he saw. He preferred to have the half view. It enabled him, in the brutalities of the ancient world, to see and not see.

Five years before this, Cicero had become agitated about a runaway slave belonging to the famous actor Aesopus. Aesopus was a friend, and Cicero wrote about the runaway to his brother Quintus, propraetor in Roman Asia. Licinius, the slave, in the company of Patro, an Epicurean, had posed as a freedman in Athens and then had gone to Asia. He seems to have been making his way as a free man, but then he became over-confident. He went back to Athens and fell into the company of Plato, another Epicurean, who a little later had a letter from Aesopus about his runaway slave. Plato put two and two
together, and had poor Licinius arrested. Cicero didn't know whether the runaway had been taken to a jail or a private mill. He wanted his brother to find out, and to send the man back to Rome. Aesopus was “grieved at his slave's criminal audacity” and wanted the man back. “Don't stop to consider what the fellow is worth,” Cicero wrote. “He is of no great value. He is a mere nobody.”

Slaves at a mill ground corn; it was an immemorial punishment. The mill would have been an everyday sight in the ancient world. There is a mill in the
Odyssey;
there is a mill in the second-century
Metamorphoses
by Apuleius; there is a mill in
Salammbô
. They are all dreadful places. In Flaubert's mill (on Hamilcar's estate) the slaves are muzzled so that they won't eat the flour they are grinding; this is pure Flaubert, cruelty for cruelty's sake. The truest description, which appears to be taken from life, is in Apuleius. The animals are in an awful way, with the hooves of the donkeys overgrown, to add to their torment; and the slaves are disfigured runts, their eyelids half caked with the smoke from the baking ovens, with letters branded on their foreheads and their half-shaved heads, irons on their legs, and their bodies seamed all over with the marks of old floggings. They are covered with dirty flour, the way the athletes in the arena were covered with dust (a detail that brings the arena to life).

It is extraordinary that Cicero could contemplate a man, fairly educated, with social gifts, and recently acting like a free man, committed to that kind of hopelessness. But for Cicero, with his lawyer's instinctive fierceness about slaves and his
politician's wish, in a disturbed republic, to maintain social order, Licinius the slave had simply been criminal and audacious to run away, and had put himself beyond the pale.

He deals with this matter in a paragraph. Then he goes on, with Roman political news of 60
BC
: “And now let me tell you what you most desire to know. The constitution is completely lost to us …”

I
F WE HAVE TO
define modern sensibility in literature, we can, I suppose, say that it is one that in its assessment of the world brings all the senses into play and does so within a frame of reason. Virgil's big poem, the
Aeneid
, is restricted in many ways, but in its restrictions, its simple landscapes and simpler theology, its celebration of earth rites, its simple ideas of history, it seems to take us straight into the official Roman world view. But it may be that in this poem Virgil was holding himself back; it may be that there was available to him another, more intimate way of looking and feeling—a strangely modern way—that could not be used in formal, imperial work.

At the end of the two-volume Loeb edition of Virgil the editor prints eight minor poems which may or may not be by Virgil. One of these poems is “Moretum.” It is a hundred and twenty-four lines, five Loeb pages, and is a work of great beauty. The editor describes it as an idyll, which means a rustic or pastoral scene, though it is like no idyll I know. According to the editor, it is derived from a Greek poem, and is also a reworking of a century-old Latin piece; it has sixty-nine non-Virgilian
words, and is too realistic to be by Virgil. But in the
Georgics
, Virgil's poem about agriculture and country life, there are realistic passages which seem to be drawn from long observation; and Virgil would have known that realism of this kind would not have worked in the formal narrative and artificial landscapes of the
Aeneid
. The point about the authorship of “Moretum” is not really important, however; what is being suggested here is that Virgil would have known about the style of “Moretum,” and it would have been a style that was open to him.

The poem is without any supernatural machinery. This immediately makes it closer to the reader. It begins at cockcrow on a winter's dawn. Simylus, who works a smallholding, hears the cock and, lying on his poor bedding on the floor, awakes in the dark and straight away begins to worry about hunger later in the morning.

He stretches out his hand to the fireplace. An ember from last night's fire burns him. He gets up then, takes his lamp, uses a needle to pull out the wick, and holds the lamp at a slant against the coals which still have life; he puffs and puffs to get the wick to catch. It does, but it is not easy. He uses his hand to shelter the flame against draughts, and unlocks the closet door with a key. There is a small heap of corn on the ground. He uses a measure to take what he needs; sets his now faithful lamp (as he thinks of it) on a tiny shelf, which he has put up against the wall for just such a purpose. He is dressed in goatskin. He begins to work his little stone mill, pouring the corn from the top with his left hand, driving the wheel with his right, while the bruised grain runs down the lower stone.
Round and round the wheel goes. He begins to sing a country song, and then from time to time he shouts for Scybale.

She is his only help, and is perhaps a slave, though that isn't said. She is a black African—the only black African I know in Latin literature—and, perhaps because she is unusual, she (unlike Simylus) is described in detail: curly hair, swollen lips, dark (
fusca colore
), broad-chested, her breasts hanging low, her belly flat, her legs thin, her feet broad and flat. Her shoes are torn in many places.

Simylus tells her to put more logs on the fire and heat some cold water. (So far everything in the morning ritual has been physically explained: the dying fire from the night before, the little shelf for the lamp, the storage place in the closet for the grain, the little stone mill. But now some things are left out: we don't know where the water came from and where it was kept, and we don't know where Scybale slept.)

Simylus finishes his grinding, puts the crushed grain in a sieve, and shakes it. The husks remain in the sieve, the pure meal drifts down. This meal he spreads on a smooth table, pours Scybale's hot water on it, packs and kneads the moistened meal until it is hard, from time to time sprinkling salt on it. Now with his palm he flattens the mixture, makes it round, and marks where it is to be divided into four equal portions. Scybale has in the meantime cleared a space in the hearth, and there the morning's flat bread is placed, and covered with tiles and fire, Vulcan and Vesta, so to speak.

(I have no Greek; it was not taught at my school. If Robin Lane Fox hadn't written to me about it, I wouldn't have known that
scybale
was Greek for dung or rubbish. So the poor African
woman slave was named for what she was thought to work in; she became “Miss Manure”: horrible, this insult lodged in a beautiful idyll.)

Simylus has little in his house to go with his bread. From the ceiling near his hearth no larder hangs with dried and salted bacon. There are only old round cheeses in baskets of woven fennel. But he has a little herb garden outside, watered when necessary by rills near by, and sheltered by willows and reeds. He works in this garden when it rains and on holidays. He has the gardener's skills. He grows cabbage, beet, sorrel, mallows and leeks, lettuce that rounds off a rich banquet, and radishes and gourds. This is not for himself. Every nine days he gets together a load of faggots, which he takes to the town to sell. He comes back light in neck and shoulder and heavy in pocket; he doesn't spend his money on city goods. To curb his own hunger he eats red onions and chives, sharp-tasting nasturtium that pinches the face, and endives. And there is colewort that brings back amorous capacity.

Outside now in his garden Simylus digs his fingers in the earth and pulls out four bulbs or cloves of garlic, adds to this some parsley, rue and coriander. Then in the cottage he sits by the pleasant fire and loudly calls to the maid for a mortar. He peels off the outer skin of the garlic bulbs, lets that skin fall on the floor, puts the garlic and its leaves in the mortar, sprinkles salt on it, adds some salt-hardened cheese, puts on top the parsley, rue and coriander. With the pestle he crushes first the fragrant garlic, then grinds the whole mixture together. The various elements gradually lose their particular strength, the colours blend into one, not green, not white; and then he
adds a few drops of oil and a little strong vinegar, stirs the dish, until at last he runs two fingers around the mortar and presses everything together into a ball. This is the “moretum” which, with his flat bread (Scybale has taken it out of the hearth), he will take to the field as his food for the day.

Carefree, now that he has lost his fear of hunger for the day, he puts on his leggings and cap, forces his obedient bullocks under the leather-bound yoke, and drives them to the fields, where they bury the plough in the earth.

T
HE PHYSICAL DETAILS
in this poem, taking nothing for granted, making us see and touch and feel at every point, celebrate the physical world in an almost religious way—lighting the lamp (the Roman wick-and-oil lamp, which never developed through all the Roman centuries), grinding the corn, kneading the dough—and these details turn the smallholder's morning into ritual. This kind of writing will appear two thousand years later in the stories Tolstoy did after learning Greek in mid-life in order to read the epics. But the Roman taste was for the rhetorical, in which what was ordinary could be inflated.

The high style of poetry reached its peak with Virgil and the other poets in the first century
BC
. What is amazing is how little it developed afterwards. Latin poetry (properly speaking) ended long before the empire ended. The poets of the fourth century play games; they have little to tell us; it is as though the early poets had used up all the high matter of Rome, and there was nothing of that sort left for latecomers.

Of course there was much to observe. We would love to know about life in the late empire; we would love to be taken into the hut of people like Simylus and Scybale; but the poets don't help us now, and all of that is closed to us.