Roman Society from Nero to Marcus AureliusDill, Samuel
Philosophy
Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius
Dill, Samuel
Rome -- Religion; Rome -- Social life and customs
The most curious and interesting among the regulations for these club
entertainments are those relating to order and decorum. The club of Diana
and Antinous was not very select, being probably composed of poor freedmen
and slaves.(1547) The manners of this class, if we may judge by the
picture given by Petronius, were, to say the least, wanting in reserve and
self-restraint. The great object of such reunions was, as the founder
tells us, that the brethren might dine together cheerfully and
quietly.(1548) Hence he most wisely orders that all serious proposals and
complaints shall be reserved for business meetings. If any member quits
his place or makes a disturbance, he is to pay a fine of four sesterces.
Twelve sesterces is the penalty for insulting a fellow-guest. The man who,
under the influence of good wine, so far forgot himself as to insult the
chief officer of the society, was to be punished by a forfeit of twenty
sesterces, which would probably be a powerful discouragement of bad
manners to most of the brotherhood of Antinous.
Many another gift or bequest, of the same character as Marcellina’s, meets
the eye of the student of the inscriptions The motives are singularly
uniform—to repay the honours conferred by a college, to celebrate the
dedication of a statue, to save from forgetfulness a name which to us is
only a bit of the wreckage of time. Everything is conventional about these
bequests. The money is nearly always left for the same purpose, an
anniversary repast in honour of the humble dead, of the emperor, or of the
patron gods. Sometimes the burial fee is refunded to the college, with the
prayer that on the natal day the poor pittance derived from the gift be
spent on pious rites, with roses strewn upon the grave.(1549) Another will
beg only that the lamp in the humble vault may be kept for ever burning.
These pieties and longings, which have their roots in a rude pagan past
before the dawn of history, were destined to prolong their existence far
into Christian times. The lamp will be kept burning over many a tomb of
saint or martyr in the fourth or fifth century. And the simple feasts
which the clothworkers of Brescia, or the boatmen of Ostia or Lyons,
observed to do honour to some departed patron, will be celebrated, often
in riotous fashion, over the Christian dead in the days of S. Augustine
and S. Paulinus of Nola.(1550)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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