98 Chapter 5
plants, for the Romans, though thoroughly urbanized,
never lost their taste for growing things.
Yet by modern standards, the lives of ordinary Ro-
mans must have been largely without root or purpose.
Marriage was rare, and people tended to contract casual
relationships with little regard for the social standing of
their partners. The birthrate remained correspondingly
low, and children born to these unions were sometimes
left to be found by slave traders. The population of the
city would have declined had it not been for the steady
influx of slaves and of refugees fleeing from the hard
life of the countryside.
The Romans made little effort to impose their cul-
ture on the peoples of the empire, asking only that
taxes be paid and peace maintained. Areas such as
Egypt or Judea whose cultures were long established
and fundamentally alien to Greco-Roman values there-
fore remained unassimilated. Tribal societies, or those
in which the ideal of civic life had native roots, were
more likely to imitate Roman models. By the end of the
principate, Italy, Spain, Africa, and much of Gaul had
been thoroughly Romanized, while Greece, Syria, and
the Greek-speaking communities of Asia Minor, though
they retained their native cultures, were drawing closer
to the Roman orbit.
In general, the social structure and daily life of west-
ern cities resembled that of Rome. Eastern towns were
different. Slavery was much less widespread, and the
bulk of the artisans and laborers were citizens. Most of
the latter, though poor, appear to have been self-
supporting. In general, craft production in the eastern
cities was far more important than in the more agrarian
west, and their average size was probably greater.
Alexandria, still more Greek than Egyptian, was almost
as large as Rome, while places such as Pergamum and
Antioch probably had close to a half million inhabitants.
Country life also differed. In the west, large farms
and latifundia, worked either by slaves or coloni,were
common. In the east, wealthy townsmen and city gov-
ernments owned tracts that they rented to tenant farm-
ers in return for cash payments or a portion of the
yield. In both regions, independent farmers worked
freehold plots with varying degrees of success. Egypt
remained as it had been under the Ptolemies—a world
of impoverished peasants laboring for the state under
an appalling burden of taxation.DOCUMENT 5.6
City Life in the Roman Empire
In his Third Satire, the poet Juvenal (c. A.D. 60–after
128) congratulates a friend on his decision to leave Rome for
a small country town by cataloging the hazards of urban life.Who, on Tivoli’s heights, or a small town like
Gabii, say,
Fears the collapse of his house? But Rome is sup-
ported on pipestems,
Matchsticks; it’s cheaper, so, for the landlord to
shore up his ruins,
Patch up the old cracked walls, and notify all the
tenants
They can sleep secure, though the beams are in ru-
ins above them.
No, the place to live is out there, where no cry of
Fire!
Sounds the alarm of the night, with a neighbor
yelling for water,
Moving his chattels and goods, and the whole
third story is smoking.
This you’ll never know: for if the ground floor is
scared first,
You are the first to burn, up where the eaves of the
attic
Keep off the rain, and the doves are brooding over
their nest eggs.Look at the other things, the various dangers of
nighttime....
You are a thoughtless fool, unmindful of sudden
disaster,
If you don’t make your will before you go out to
have dinner.
There are as many deaths in the night as there are
open windows
Where you pass by; if you’re wise, you will pray in
your wretched devotions,
People may be content with no more than empty-
ing slop jars.
The Satires of Juvenal,pp. 40, 43, trans. Rolfe Humphries.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958. Used by
permission.