Leisure and Ancient Rome E-Book

J. P. Toner

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 457

Beschreibung

In this book Toner offers a new way of looking at Roman society at all levels, not just among the elite, by examining the imperial games and the baths as well as gambling, the taverns, theatre and carnivals.

Leseprobe

Leisure and Ancient Rome

J. P. Toner

Polity Press

Copyright © J. P. Toner 1995

The right of J. P. Toner to be identified as

author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1995 by Polity Press

in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

First published in paperback 1998

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Polity Press, 65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Published in the USA by

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Toner, J. P.

Leisure and ancient Rome / J.P. Toner.

    p.     cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7456-1432-9 (hardback : alk paper)

ISBN 0-7456-2198-8 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-7456-6890-1 (ebook)

1. Rome—Social life and customs. 2. Leisure—Social aspects—

Rome. 3. Recreation—Social aspects—Rome. I. Title.

DG78. T655 1995

306.4’812’09376—dc20

95-16182

CIP

Typeset in 10½ on 12 pt Times by Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd, Hong Kong

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Lindsay Ross International Ltd, Oxfordshire

Contents

List of Plates

Preface

Texts and Abbreviations

  1   History, Leisure, and Ancient Rome

  2   Leisure

  3   Definitions

  4   Leisure and Otium

  5   Blood, Sweat, and Charioteers: The Imperial Games

  6   The Baths

  7   Goodbye to Gravitas: Popular Culture and Leisure

  8   Gambling

  9   Sex and the Problematization of Leisure

10   Leisure and the Dialectic of Rome

11   Epilogue: History, Historicism, and Relativism

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Plates

Between pp. 118–19.

  1

Amphitheatre Mosaic

Reproduced by permission of Sousse Archaeological Museum

  2

Lyon Mosaic

Reproduced by permission of Musée de la Civilisation Gallo-Romaine, Lyon

  3

Pompeii: ‘Scènes de cabaret’ I

From M. Collignon, Melanges Biossier, Paris, 1903, pls I-II

  4

Pompeii: ‘Scènes de cabaret’ II

From Prescuhn,  Die neuesten Ausgrabungen, Leipzig, 1882, pl. 7

  5

Pompeii: ‘Scènes de cabaret’ III

From Prescuhn,  Die neuesten Ausgrabungen, Leipzig, 1882, pl. 7

  6

Fighting Cock

Reproduced by kind permission of Deutsches Archaeologisches Institut, Istanbul

  7

Mosaic from the Thermae of Caracalla

Reproduced by kind permission of Kunstbibliothek, Berlin

  8

Pottery Lamp

Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum

  9

Game Board

Reproduced by kind permission of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies; photograph: M. Roueche from Mrs C. M. Roueche, Performers and Partisans at Aphrodisias

10

Skeleton Mosaic

Photograph: Scala, Florence

Preface

I have incurred many debts of gratitude in the course of writing this book and I am pleased to have the chance to repay them, however inadequately, in this preface. For their frequent acts of kindness and generosity, my thanks go to: Neil and Melanie Crosby, Jon Gifford, David Holton, Sue Jeffreys, Chris Kelly, Rustom Khandalavala, Bruce Kiddy, John Leigh, Ashley and Jane Meggitt, Bernard and Brenda Meggitt, Nicholas Purcell, and Andrew Wilson. For their institutional assistance, my thanks to Selwyn College and the staff of the University Library. I am also grateful to Gill Motley and John Thompson of Polity Press for their enthusiastic and long-suffering support.

I would particularly like to thank Justin Meggitt, David Woodhouse, and Melanie Wright, who have all been true thoroughbreds in matters of friendly help and criticism, and Peter Garnsey, without whose expert training I would never have made the race-track, let alone completed the course.

This work is dedicated to my parents.

Texts and Abbreviations

Teubner and Oxford classical texts have been used throughout. In the interest of accessibility, I have tried to keep all translations as close as possible to those of the Loeb Classical Library. Classical texts are abbreviated in accordance with the Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, or, if not contained within that work, the Oxford Greek-English Lexicon, ed. H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Other titles are in accordance with the list of sources, with abbreviations, in vol. 3 of A. H. M. Jones’ The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic and Administrative Survey, pp. 394-406. The titles of periodicals and journals are abbreviated in accordance with the Index des Péiodiques Supplément à L’Année Philologique 57, ed. P. Rosumek, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1982.

The following abbreviations are used:

ABull

The Art Bulletin

ANRW

Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt

CIL

Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum

CPh

Classical Philology

CQ

Classical Quarterly

FL

Folklore

G &R

Greece and Rome

H &T

History and Theory

JbAC

Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum

JHI

Journal of the History of Ideas

JIH

Journal of Interdisciplinary History

JLR

Journal of Leisure Research

JLS

Leisure Studies: The Journal of the Leisure Studies Association

JMH

Journal of Modern History

JPh

Journal of Philosophy

JQR

Jewish Quarterly Review

JRA

Journal of Roman Archaeology

JRS

Journal of Roman Studies

JThS

Journal of Theological Studies

P & P

Past and Present

PBSR

Papers of the British School at Rome

PLM

Poetae Latini Minores

TLS

The Times Literary Supplement

1

History, Leisure, and Ancient Rome

In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume asks: ‘Would you know the sentiments, inclinations, and course of life of the Greeks and Romans? Study well the temper and actions of the French and English. You cannot be much mistaken in transforming to the former most of the observations which you have made with regard to the latter.’1 As with the Greeks themselves, Hume’s idea of history was one which revealed the eternal in the actual. But history has moved on, and, according to Schama, the search for the timeless has been replaced by the ‘insoluble quandary’ of the historian: ‘how to live in two worlds at once; how to take the broken, mutilated remains of something or someone from the “enemy lines” of the documented past and restore it to life or give it a decent interment in our own time and place.’2 This work is an attempt to confront that double life of an historian by using the concept of leisure to analyse Rome, whilst using the history of Rome to analyse the concept of leisure itself. It is, therefore, an inquiry into both the form of history and its epistemological foundations which is based on the practical reality of writing a history of Rome.

This work is an attempt to write what Bloch called ‘une histoire plus humaine’.3 This is an idea which rests on the belief that history is not lagging behind other disciplines. Rather, history is its own mode of thought, one which is better able to cope with the practical problems of life. Atkinson has observed:

… if there is a key to the understanding of history and with it historical explanation, it is that it is a study which has achieved the highest level of sophistication and professionalism, without becoming theoretical; without to any significant extent developing a technical vocabulary of its own; and without attempting to classify the phenomena with which it deals in the systematic way, which is the only sure path to laws and theories and the sort of explanations offered by the sciences. There is a marked contrast between the precision and subtlety of the content of historical thinking and the somewhat homespun simplicity of its form.4

However, this ‘more human history’ hopes to achieve an understanding of Roman life and all its problems by becoming, at least in part, theoretical.5 For the interdisciplinary influences which now affect history mean that the historian cannot escape from methodology. Nor is this necessarily a harmful development, so long as theory can be expressed in a somewhat homespun and simple way. In fact, its very simplicity makes history well suited to theorizing, in that it cuts to the heart of problems without ever losing touch with the realities from which they arise.

In that my approach seeks to understand the Romans by treating all parts of their culture equally, it is akin to a Geertzian cultural history.6 Both approaches are informed by our egalitarian social ideals. However, whilst the use of the term ‘culture’ has served to reintegrate many of the different approaches to history, such a centripetal concept has also obscured ideological and class issues by assuming a uniformity in its subjects. It has imposed our ideal of equality on others by seeing equality in their cultures. The problem is that it is impossible to create a harmonious image of Roman culture because their society was fiercely hierarchical. In fact, there is no society where all its members share the same linguistic and non-linguistic practices. As Crapanzano has asked of Geertz, ‘How can a whole people share a single subjectivity?’7 Much social knowledge could be termed ‘discultural’ in that it is knowledge which is held by a minority of a society’s members, as opposed to cultural knowledge which is generally understood. Geertz’s ‘webs of meaning’ need to be historicized, for that will bring out a culture’s disparate, inegalitarian elements. A more human history is precisely that because it does not dictate the terms of engagement with the past. It allows others to express their culture on their own terms, however abhorrent those terms might be to us.

The problem for cultural historians is that they tend to treat all evidence as coming from one ideal, homogeneous entity. The problem with traditional historians is that they see only the scattered, surface products of human life – the words and the artefacts – without looking to connect them in any fundamental way. If a deeper analysis is to be achieved, human life should be thought of as being temporally and spatially multi-levelled, with its different strata organically interconnected. The base consists of the emotive responses and the systems of ordering meaning which are common to our humanity; then there are the levels of culture and society; and finally the top plateau, on which the human personality sits, each with its own psychological structure. Every individual is influenced by the input of every level, and this creates a series of unique products: to the influence of the broader lower levels of geo-cultures (that is to say, Mediterranean culture, Chinese culture, etc.) is added that of higher, more localized, cultures, as well as specific societies and their particular constructs. The study of people therefore entails not only a study of their personal psychology, but of the many cultural, social, and mental levels which support their existence. Each individual displays his or her own influences – their hues and textures as it were – and it is the task of the historian to separate the colours of individuals into their constituent pigments. Different sections of the whole model will be closely matched – reds and blues will be the primary mix in one place, greens and yellows in another – but individuals will reveal their own subtle shadings, and it is these that allow us the opportunity to reconstruct the structures which prop up their way of life. For the differences in colour reflect not only the various levels of a culture, but its discrepancies in discourse, temperament, and behaviour as well.

As such, culture consists of a continuum between humanity and personal psychology. Culture is knowledge, for it is everything that has to be learnt as opposed to the learning processes themselves. Culture is also power, since, as Foucault has shown, knowledge is not ideal and abstract, but material and concrete; it cannot be divorced from the workings of power throughout society at all levels. The study of a culture, therefore, should be a matter of relating knowledge to power relations and structures, not of creating a unified image which naïvely papers over the social cracks. For cultures do not always have the flat, horizontal mien that our modern Western culture possesses; more often they are steeply inclined and stratified.

This image of culture represents not so much an organic unity but an organic totality. It is not a picture of Durkheimian static harmony but of a differentiated, dynamic structure in which the parts and the whole are internally related and reciprocally determine each other. All cultural parts can be seen analytically, as if even the smallest act contains a kind of social DNA which allows us to isolate specific genes and correlate them with societal features. Change comes to be seen as the organic product of constant cultural reproduction. As with an organism, culture is constantly changing in its attempts to maintain its balance; and it is well balanced only if it has achieved both homeostasis – a dynamic inner equilibrium – and a modus vivendi between this inner play of forces and its external environment. There is, therefore, a dynamic interplay between ideals and the changing circumstances to which they must adapt. The tensions which afflict a society can be thought of as being a function of this gap between its ideals and reality, and it is in order to bridge it that cultures build ingenious rationalizations and justifications of the status quo, as well as releasing pent-up stress through means as various as moralizing and the law. For cultural forces are directed towards achieving equilibrium by means of attempting to circumvent the obstacles which prevent it from achieving its ideal, harmonious state. All of a society’s members, whatever their status, have to turn themselves to this task. The highly intelligent and educated may achieve it more elegantly than peasants but together their collective force provides the basis for the development of mentality.

Since homeostasis is never perfect and organisms are never isolated from their environment, change is the precondition of human life; there is no need to account for it. Yet it is possible to account for the direction and speed that change takes. The direction of influence is not only upwards, from the macro to the micro. There are different levels of both change and explanation. Changes at the top level of culture – human activity in other words – can affect the lower layers. Usually that produces only small-scale change and its influence does not penetrate far downwards, but that is not always the case. Some individual actions can have profound and long-term effects because they converge with structural and cultural forces, and this promotes their speedy transmission. At the lower cultural levels, change is more general and allows a greater range of possible responses from above. Changes are also frequently the result of outside agency, when one culture is forced to join another higher up and the sudden confluence of colour creates a strikingly different tone, or when external disaster splits cultures apart. There is, therefore, no need for an Annalistic favouring of the longue durée, since each of these cultural layers has an equal claim to analytical importance (although in practice, it may be discovered that any one level of input has had greater influence than another). After all, the ‘deep’ are not more important than the ‘surface’, since they are both what they are only in relation to the other. Take away the surface and what you are left with is no longer deep but shallow.

The principal concern of this model is to illuminate the relationship between ephemeral events and deep cultural forces, but it offers some flexibility as well. It allows a moving picture of growth and development to be shot, and also a still-life to be drawn, whilst simultaneously permitting an amalgam of the two to produce a more general impression of a mode of life and its enduring traits and characteristics. There can be no doubt that this model simplifies, but then that is what a model is meant to do. It is an intellectual construct that ‘simplifies reality in order to emphasise the recurrent, the general and the typical, which it presents in the form of clusters of traits or attributes.’8 There comes a time, though, when you have to stop making models and start dating them. Therefore, the main body of this work aims to produce a history of Rome which accords with this model by splitting Roman life into its constituent parts and processes.

There are, however, fundamental and practical problems which stand in the way of analysing Roman culture as outlined above. There is the practical difficulty of historical translation, that we cannot understand the Romans’ conceptual world in their own terms and to attempt to do so leaves us trapped in an alien culture, prisoners to their tastes and doctrines, or as Geertz puts it, ‘awash in immediacies, as well as entangled in vernacular’. To try by using only specialist tools, leaves us ‘stranded in abstractions and smothered in jargon’.9 Hence, the one-sided quantifying approach of the social sciences cannot be used. For little can be gained from the wholesale deployment of strategies and signifiers if the result is that we become deaf to the voices of the very people we wish to comprehend. Without doubt, the powerful position from which most of the surviving works from antiquity were written and their ideological content cannot be ignored (indeed, their rhetoric is at the heart of an attempt at cultural analysis), but to reduce their beliefs to power matrices and data alone is to run the risk of losing touch with the harsh immediacies of their lives. If we are to discover anything about what it meant to be Roman, it will not be enough to strip away the ‘facade’ and reveal the ‘figures and coordinates’10 of the ‘real’ structure beneath. To do so would be merely to impose our way of thinking on theirs. Therefore, if we wish to comprehend these long-extinct people, a blend of the new and the old must be created with which we can appreciate the symbolic forms they used to communicate with one another. This is an acceptance that ‘history is a conversation with the dead.’11 Hopkins considers it an advantage that ‘we can do all the talking’, but this would hardly seem to make for a balanced exchange. Rather, by applying our concepts it will be possible to recover the meanings which the Romans’ words and actions had for the Romans themselves, as if we were looking through the windows of their perceptions into the rooms beyond, and simultaneously seeing our own reflection in the glass.

The nature of the historian’s engagement with the past has to be redefined. The usefulness of historians’ traditional sense of ‘being there’, their ability to ‘feel and think as another’, in short, their supposedly superior sense of historical empathy, are all thrown into doubt. It will no longer be sufficient, as if dreaming on the verandah, to ‘wonder what it was like to be there’.12 Instead, this almost divine sense of oneness with the subject is replaced by an effort to appreciate the modes of others’ thoughts in the modalities of our own. It is a far more distanced relationship, and whilst sympathy, even compassion, are necessities, they are to be aimed at the investigation of the whole range of cultural expressions, not only at a more obvious group of targets.

Hence, an anthropological obsession with the mysterious and the outlandish will be of little benefit. Griffiths quotes Darnton’s principle of research method: ‘the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems most opaque.’13 But as Griffiths rightly points out, ‘there is no reason to believe we are more fully in the presence of history when we encounter the bizarrely other.’14 If there is an excuse for the practice of fastening onto the oddities of others, then it is the Johnsonian principle of writing so as to enable the reader better to enjoy life, for there can be no doubt that the weird commands more interest, and can thus initiate more thought. What seems obscure to us can be of more use when it is marginal also to the culture which is under scrutiny. To examine the edges of a society can reveal a clearer outline of its overall shape and literally define it. As Edwards observes, ‘Cultural identity is constituted by its limits. Social deviants, those on its edge, define the central order.’15 But seeing what distinguished insiders from outsiders is only one way of defining the perimeter of the culture itself. The social silhouette provided by these means needs to be supported by throwing light onto the culture’s more solid masses. The practices and beliefs which maintained these boundaries have to be revealed and examined, otherwise the image will remain insubstantial and its detail will stay in the dark. Yet a more accurate picture will not be obtained by concentrating, as Griffiths would wish, on the ‘finest blooms’16 which a culture has nourished. To study the best of Roman otium– the art of aristocratic patronage – is indeed to observe the peaks of Roman temperament, but culture can be as wide and broad as high and low. The mundane and the central have as much claim to historical importance as the spectacular and the marginal. It is by contextualizing both that the historian will be able to understand what exactly constituted these frames of reference.

The problem we face is defining the terms of engagement with the past and the ‘others’ who inhabit it. This is why it is so useful to employ a concept like leisure as the tool for analysing Roman culture. For if we were to try to preserve ‘leisure’ as a stable category of historical analysis we would merely idealize and sterilize it. To the extent that a history of ‘leisure’ succeeds in concerning itself with ‘leisure’, it is doomed to fail as a history, unless it also includes as an essential part of its proper enterprise the task of demonstrating the historicity, conditions of emergence, modes of construction, and ideological contingencies of the very category of analysis that undergirds its own practice.17 To analyse another without analysing oneself would be an act of cultural imperialism. The questions we need to ask are: ‘What is the general form of our leisure?’; second, ‘What was the general form of their otium?’; then, ‘What was the form of Roman leisure, and the vehicles in which it was embodied?’18 By using each to elucidate the others, it will be possible to create not only an interpretation of Roman free time within its overall cultural context, but perhaps also a more human history of Roman life and leisure.

Why leisure in particular? The first reason is that leisure sociologists’ enthusiasm for their task does not seem to have extended into the past. The history of pre-industrial leisure remains an underdeveloped field, a third-world country to whose aid few have attempted to come, and which has languished in the aridity of positivism. There should be no doubt that the collation of detail is an essential part of the historian’s task, but the history of pre-industrial leisure has often been unrelated to its wider cultural environment. For whilst accounts of the Romans’ games and pastimes are two a penny, the social, political, and moral environments in which these practices occurred have been ignored.

The second is that, despite the well-established school of leisure sociology, leisure has often not been perceived as being a matter for serious research (I can bear witness to the smiles which habitually greet my subject). It might seem paradoxical to search for antiquity in a sketch drawn from seemingly non-serious leisure activities, but there is huge scope in these playful, often idealized, constructions of what life is and should be like. As with any man-made construct or institution, they express beliefs about a desired order of things, and simultaneously reflect the order as it actually stands. Furthermore, in leisure, everyday experience is ordered into events less cluttered with the demands of immediate practical purpose, and thus becomes concentrated into a form where meaning can be more powerfully articulated. They provide metacommentaries, and are undertaken in ‘full awareness of the absence of the life they contrive to represent, and hence they may skilfully anticipate and compensate for the vanishing of the actual life that has empowered them.’19

The centrality of work and efficiency to our industrial society has also meant that leisure has come to be seen as a mere adjunct to productivity. This attitude was not prevalent in the ancient world, where otium competed on a far more level footing. The study of leisure, therefore, will be a helpful way for us to highlight the differences between the Romans’ mentality and our own. Leisure, I would argue, also provides the best possible tool for the dissection of Roman society. Other studies of Roman life could be made – of their work, religion, family, to name only a few – some of which might conflict with the analyses which leisure offered. Leisure, though, would be the institution that revealed most of the traits of Roman life. Leisure would be the study to cover the most important areas of Roman culture. For the central themes of Roman life were most clearly connected in their leisure on account of the fact that Rome was felt to be characterized by its abundant leisure and the immorality it seemed to foster.

The study of leisure can thus offer a way into the wider life of ancient Rome, and provide insights into the details of what it meant to be a Roman. It also reveals the cultural frictions which existed within Roman society and the attempts that were made to lessen the heat which they generated. For the use to which Roman people put their free time was the thin end of a very large cultural wedge. Ideas about leisure were some of the sturdiest of the pillars on which Roman perceptions of society and selfhood stood, and as conditions changed so new concepts of man and society were required with which to rebuild, and sometimes shore up, the old structures. Leisure represented, as in many ways it still does, the ‘good life’. It offered people the chance to do what they wanted to do, and realize their hopes and potential free from the crushing constraints of everyday life. But there was no comfortable consensus about what the good life was, or about who could attain it. Leisure was not a neutral area. Strains and conflicts existed within Roman society, between the emperor, the elite, and the masses, and these found their most telling expression in anxieties over the use and misuse of free time. Leisure discourse was integral to ideas concerning the ordering of society and the worth of the individual within it. A similar view is also reflected in the etymology of our word ‘leisure’. Derived from the Latin licentia, leisure carries connotations of licentiousness and freedom, and also the need for this behaviour to be licensed and controlled from above.

Concepts of morality, pleasure, and luxury were closely associated with these misgivings over the corrupting potential of free time. For these tensions also reflected the ‘anxieties of superabundance’, to borrow Schama’s phrase.20 That is to say, they revealed moral concerns about the influx of new wealth and practices which accompanied the acquisition of empire. The increase in prosperity allowed for greater and more extravagant leisure provision for a much enlarged section of the populace, and as the pleasures of the aristocratic lifestyle were made more widely available through the agency of a beneficent emperor, otium was seen clearly to be no longer the preserve of the rich. The new circumstances of life under an autocrat threatened the traditional qualities of otium, challenging them with the thrills of popular entertainment and the extravagance of imperial largesse. Leisure discourse became the vehicle for the expression of elite concerns över the transformation of Roman society, and held a double significance. On the one hand, leisure was all that was left to the elite since, with the end of the republic, they were denied their traditional position of political authority. On the other, that very leisure which had traditionally been their preserve, and to which they had retired, was increasingly encroached upon by the lower orders.

No easy correlation should be assumed between these competing moralities and definable social groups. As Roman society developed from republic to empire, the distinctions between the plebs and the elite became hazier, albeit only at the margins,21 and their relationship changed. Different cultural levels existed both at societal and individual levels, and so whilst these rival moralities will be referred to in terms of their primary social origin – that is as belonging to either traditional elite, imperial, or popular cultures – there will be a constant awareness that these labels belong as much to the historian’s tool-box as to the realities of the Roman empire. These categories were never stable: ‘the Romans’, ‘the elite’, and ‘the plebs’ were all groups whose composition and structure underwent constant transformation and development. In many ways, it was the partial fusion of these various levels which generated the new image of the Roman that the emperors tried to inculcate, and also allowed individuals greater scope for resistance through the selection of other modes of expression.22

This book does not cover an exact period, for a conceptual study cannot be marked out temporally in the same meticulous manner as a traditional history of politics. The social evolution of leisure ideas and the assignation of values to activities occurred at a near sedentary pace in comparison to the high-speed chases of public life. Attitudes towards certain forms of leisure seem barely to have changed for centuries. But these enduring concepts were put to work in fresh areas and served new functions, thereby assuring their continued development alongside the contingencies of the day. Nor can the inquiry be given free rein to race through the ages, if the concepts involved are not to be left stranded in historical generalization and unintegrated with their immediate context. It is not so much a case of our taking snapshots of events at particular moments and fixing them against the motion pictures which frame them, as the very opposite – locating the action from sets of interrelated dramas against a far more static cultural backdrop. Accordingly, for the purposes of this investigation, two time-scales have been in operation. The analysis of the political evolution of leisure has concentrated on the transition period from republic to empire, that is to say the first centuries BC and AD, with the evidence for the establishment and maintenance of an imperial image of Romanness being drawn principally from the first and early second centuries AD. However, the examination of the underlying currents of social opinion and custom has flowed on a different temporal plane. That has been allowed to meander more freely, drawing on whatever sources were to be found (mostly the period from Cicero in the first century BC to Ammianus in the fourth century AD). This may have created a farrago of convictions and prejudices, along with all their individual and local bias, but the approach has two justifications: one is the practical excuse that the ancient historian cannot afford to pass over any details that might help to build up a picture of the Roman mentality; the other is that the difficult and perplexing network of perspectives produced by this process may, in all likelihood, give an accurate record of the background hiss above which the dramas of Roman life were heard. It is to this very noise that our ears are especially well attuned. These were the bases on which Roman life was structured, the things about which they gave scarcely a second thought, but which for our understanding are crucial.23 To put it more theoretically, when I use sources from different eras and backgrounds I am trying to use them as evidence for the structure of the lower levels of Roman culture – cutting off, as it were, the more localized upper levels of their lives to reveal the more common, enduring fundamentals beneath. For example, Christian sources can rub shoulders with pagan precisely because there were many areas of continuity between them. Many on both the left and the right will, no doubt, deplore this approach for lacking ‘sophistication in reading’ or the like. I can only emphasize that I am taking a top-down look at the Roman world, rather than employing their bottom-up method. By this I mean that my concern has been to create a framework of understanding for the whole of Roman culture, into which specific sources with all their axes to grind can then be situated.

A similar method is in operation in the matter of geography, and has been necessary for the same reasons. The exploration of the process of the politicization of leisure and its development within the empire, has centred on the city of Rome.24 As the seat of government and the home of the powerful, this seemed the most obvious place to begin, the place where general attributes would be most concentrated and hence most easily accessible. Rome’s unique characteristics – its immensity and its corn dole – would have affected its local form of leisure greatly, and might even have exaggerated more common traits of the Roman temperament. However, a more liberal sense of location has been required to establish these traits. Most evidence has come from Rome, from where so many of the surviving texts originated, but when other places have offered help it has not been refused. Once again, the reasons are partly pragmatic, partly methodological. Beggars cannot be choosers, but the scraps they scavenge from the scattered dustbins of history can amass into a highly effective facsimile of social realities.

The work on Rome will not produce a conclusion, nor does it seek to, but in toto the various chapters build up into what tries to be the ‘histoire plus humaine’ I have discussed in this introduction. This will have three main parts: an analysis of Rome which accords with the historical model of culture; the production of generally applicable social theory drawn from the Roman case study; and finally, the acquisition of a fuller understanding of the intellectual foundations on which such a history stands. For this is a book on leisure as well as antiquity and shows what happens when two cultures and their concepts come together.

2

Leisure

St Augustine once said that so long as he was not asked to define the concept of time then he knew what it was, but if asked then he did not.1 The notion of leisure seems to have identical properties. Wilson tells us that ‘leisure is notoriously difficult to define’, but I think it is crucial that prior to examining Rome we have a fuller knowledge of the concept with which we are to try to effect our history. For whilst this book is primarily a historical analysis of Roman culture as evidenced in its leisure, it is also concerned with the epistemological status of that analysis. What is more immediately significant for our project is that most leisure sociologists have denied that the concept of leisure is even applicable to the pre-industrial world, so if we are to progress at all we shall have first to overcome this obstacle.