The World

No epoch realizes at the time quite how lucky it is until it is gone. But the spirit of this epoch was a lucky one of clement weather, lush harvests and plentiful revenues from an imperial population of between fifty and seventy million. Trajan possessed the three essentials of greatness – acumen, vision and resources. Between wars to annihilate the Dacians (Romania), he embarked on a massive building programme in Rome, boasting of his grandeur and victories with new temples, his triumphal column and the new stadium called Circus Maximus.

The rich, served by droves of slaves, enjoyed luxury and ease – ‘Red Sea pearls and polished Indian ivory’, in the words of the poet Martial – but the realities of urban life, imperial power and Roman society remained gritty and messy, corrupt and brutal.

Rome was now a seething mega-city of a million people, with the emperors enjoying vast palaces, the rich in sumptuous villas and the poor piled high in insulae, ten-storey blocks of flats. ‘I live in a little cell, with a window that won’t even close,’ wrote Martial, ‘in which Boreas [god of dark winter] himself wouldn’t want to live.’ Martial, another well-born Spaniard doing well in Rome, had been in and out of imperial favour but chronicled the hypocritical lubricity of high and low with irrepressible mischief. ‘With your giant nose and cock /’, he wrote, ‘I bet you can with ease / When you get excited / Check the end for cheese.’ He hated the cruelty of sadistic slave masters: ‘You say that the hare isn’t cooked, and ask for the whip; / Rufus, you prefer to carve up your cook than your hare.’ Yet he had a heart too. His most touching poem was in praise of a beloved enslaved female who died young: ‘A child with a voice as sweet as the fabled swan’s.’^*

Yet even the poor could enjoy what Juvenal called ‘bread and circuses’ – the bloody spectacles at the Colosseum and the Circus with 50,000 and 200,000 seats^* – and the baths. Trajan was just the latest potentate to build his own thermae. Sixty thousand Romans could bathe at any one time – ideal for what Ovid had called ‘furtive sport’. Nothing so defined urbane luxury as the baths that became the mark of Romanness: ‘To bathe is to live,’ a Roman scrawled on a wall, while the gravestone of a jolly bon vivant declared, ‘Baths, sex and wine ruin our bodies but make life worth living.’ A timeless truth. Yet it is ironic that the baths define Roman civilisation since they also probably spread the waterborne diseases that killed so many. In the baths, Martial chronicled naked Rome: he noticed that men tried to cover circumcised penises (the mark of Jewish slaves and therefore very unfashionable) and recorded the hilarity as thousands of bathers applauded when a spectacularly well-endowed man disrobed. He mocked the virtuous wife who was so excited by mixed bathing that she eloped with a youth, and the macho man who went to ogle young penises. A graffito from this time reads: ‘Apelles and Dexter had lunch here most pleasantly and fucked at the same time,’ adding, ‘We Apelles the Mouse and his brother Dexter lovingly fucked two women twice.’ The Roman city was replicated across the empire from Mauritania to Britannia: the word civilisation derives from civis, town, and civilisation comes from urbis, city. But cities were flourishing not only in Europe, Africa and Asia.