Modern criticism has laboured hard to correct some of the harsher judgments on the luxury and self-indulgence of the period of the early Empire. Perhaps the scholarly reaction against an indictment which had degenerated sometimes into ignorant commonplace, may have been carried here and there too far. The testimony of Tacitus is explicit that the luxury of the table reached its height in the hundred years extending from the battle of Actium to the accession of Vespasian.(384) It was a period of enormous fortunes spent in enormous waste. Seneca or Pallas or Narcissus had accumulated wealth probably three or four times greater than even the fortune of a Crassus or a Lucullus. The long peace, the safety of the seas, and the freedom of trade, had made Rome the entrepôt for the peculiar products and the delicacies of every land from the British Channel to the Ganges. The costly variety of these foreign dainties was vulgarly paraded at every great dinner-party. Palaces, extending almost over the area of a town, were adorned with marbles from the quarries of Paros, Laconia, Phrygia, or Numidia,(385) with gilded ceilings and curious panels changing with the courses of the banquet,(386) with hundreds of tables of citrus-wood, resting on pillars of ivory, each costing a moderate fortune, with priceless bronzes and masterpieces of ancient plate. Nearly a million each year was drained away to the remoter East, to purchase aromatics and jewels for the elaborate toilette of the Roman lady.(387) Hundreds of household slaves, each with his minute special function, anticipated every want, or ministered to every passion of their masters. Every picturesque or sheltered site on the great lakes, on the Anio, or the Alban hills, in the Laurentine pine forests, or on the bays of Campania, was occupied by far-spreading country seats. Lavish expenditure and luxurious state was an imperious duty of rank, even without the precept of an emperor.(388) The senator who paid too low a rent, or rode along the Appian or Flaminian Way with too scanty a train, became a marked man, and immediately lost caste.(389) These are the merest commonplace of the social history of the time.
Yet in spite of the admitted facts of profusion and self-indulgence, we may decline to accept Juvenal’s view of the luxury of the age without some reserve. It is indeed no apology for the sensuality of a section of the Roman aristocracy in that day, to point out that the very same excesses made their appearance two centuries before him, and that they will be lamented both by Pagan and Christian moralists three centuries after his death. But these facts suggest a doubt whether the cancer of luxury had struck so deep as satirists thought into the vitals of a society which remained for so many centuries erect and strong. Before the end of the third century B.C., began the long series of sumptuary laws which Tiberius treated as so futile.(390) The elder Pliny and Livy date the introduction of luxurious furniture from the return of the army in 188 B.C., after the campaign in Asia.(391) Crassus, who left, after the most prodigal expenditure, a fortune of £1,700,000, had a town house which cost over £60,000.(392) The lavish banquets of Lucullus were proverbial, and his villa at Misenum was valued at £24,000. It was an age when more than £1000 was given for a slave-cook or a pair of silver cups.(393) Macrobius has preserved the menu of a pontifical banquet, at which Julius Caesar and the Vestals were present, and which in its costly variety surpassed, as he says, any epicurism of the reign of Honorius.(394) And yet Ammianus and S. Jerome level very much the same charges against the nobles of the fourth century,(395) which satire makes against the nobles of the first. When we hear the same anathemas of luxury in the days of Lucullus and in the reign of Honorius, separated by an interval of more than five centuries, in which the Roman race stamped itself on the page of history and on the face of nature by the most splendid achievements of military virtue and of civilising energy, we are inclined to question either the report of our authorities, or the satirist’s interpretation of the social facts.