Memento Mori E-Book

Peter Jones

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In this revealing and entertaining guide to how the Romans confronted their own mortality, Peter Jones shows us that all the problems associated with old age and death that so transfix us today were already dealt with by our ancient ancestors two thousand years ago. Romans inhabited a world where man, knowing nothing about hygiene let alone disease, had no defences against nature. Death was everywhere. Half of all Roman children were dead by the age of five. Only eight per cent of the population made it over sixty. One bizarre result was that half the population consisted of teenagers. From the elites' philosophical take on the brevity of life to the epitaphs left by butchers, bakers and buffoons, Memento Mori ('Remember you die') shows how the Romans faced up to this world and attempted to take the sting out of death.

Leseprobe

MEMENTO MORI

Also by Peter Jones

Vote for Caesar

Learn Latin: The Book of the Daily Telegraph QED Series

Veni, Vidi, Vici

Eureka!

Quid Pro Quo

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2018 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Peter Jones 2018

The moral right of Peter Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. 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 both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78649-480-1E-book ISBN: 978-1-78649-481-8Paperback ISBN: 978-1-78649-482-5

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn Imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZwww.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1   Lifespan

2   Young versus old: a brief digression

3   The death of children

4   The trials of old age

5   Facing up to death

6   Exemplary and ignominious deaths

7   Cicero’s De Senectute: ‘On Old Age’

8   Death and burial

9   Epitaphs and the afterlife

10   Epilogue: Memento Mori

Appendix: A Curse Tablet

Dramatis personae

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The copious sources for this topic of suitably undying interest reside in the Bibliography. Tim G. Parkin’s Old Age in the Roman World remained the key point of reference. I am extremely grateful to Colin Leach and Jeannie Cohen for help with a number of problems.

The little poem by Ausonius and comment by Marcus Aurelius (see pp. 191–2) sum up my feelings on the subject.

Peter JonesNewcastle upon TyneApril 2018

INTRODUCTION

All modern books announce that, thanks to advances in diet and medicine, old age is an exciting new phenomenon with endless possibilities. Soon we shall all be able to make it our ambition to live for ever or die in the attempt. Adam would rather sniff at that – he lived to 930 – and so would Methuselah, who holds the biblical world record at 969. These are, however, positive teenagers compared with the Sumerian kings of ancient Babylon (modern Iraq), of whom En-men-lu-anna clocked in at 43,200.

The wrath of God at least sorted out the biblical heroes. Abraham only made it to 175, Isaac to 180 and Joseph to 110, and at Genesis 6:3 God fixed the span of human life at a generous 120 years. Recent studies in Canada suggest that 125 should be reachable. So when you reached sixty, you would have another whole wonderful lifetime to go, adding all the burdens of the first 60 years to the next 60. What a prospect. But then prediction is always difficult, especially when it refers to the future.

Ancient Greeks and the Psalms, more realistically, came up with around three score years and ten. They, however, should have been so lucky. In the battle against Hannibal at Cannae (216 BC) the Romans lost some 50,000 men in one day. In AD 165 Marcus Cornelius Fronto wrote to his close friend the emperor Marcus Aurelius:

I have lost five children in the most wretched circumstances of my life, all five separately, each an only child, and suffering this series of bereavements in such a way that no child was born to me except when I was already bereaved. So I always lost children without any left to comfort me, and procreated others with my grief still fresh upon me.

From AD 165 to 180, a plague, starting in the East and returning nine years later, killed probably about 5 million people. Three score years and ten were quite a few years too many for most of the population.

So it is not surprising that, as far back as records allow us to go, old age was often seen as something precious and probably the work of the gods, and the old were therefore rich sources of experience and wisdom (an African motto states ‘When an old man dies, a library burns down’). Not, as we shall see, that Aristotle would agree. Further, in the classical world we regularly find that old age was rather to be feared, because of increasing physical and mental decline.

Contrast today. We can hardly move for oldies and – thanks to birth control, female education and declining poverty – globally we are now almost at ‘peak’ babies. So it is going to get worse: population will grow only because oldies refuse to help out by signing a ‘do not resuscitate’ form. And that raises the question ‘To what purpose?’ Life for its own sake? It looks like it, given the enthusiasm with which medical services spend their resources on keeping us oldies alive at all costs (about half the NHS budget is spent on the over-65s) merely guaranteeing that all the sooner will they run out of money to spend on the young. No wonder age is not held in honour. No wonder ageing journalists try to buck us all up by announcing that eighty is the ‘new twenty’ (though as Tom Stoppard pointed out, it is actually the new ninety). Naturally, there is nothing wrong with hankering after the philosopher Plato’s ideal:

In the eyes of the majority, the highest condition attainable by a human being is to be rich, healthy and honoured, live to an old age and, after burying one’s parents decently, to be decently buried by one’s own children, in magnificent style.

But it was an ideal because virtually no one actually realized it. Today the price of realizing it seems to be pedalling the highways or pounding the pavements in Day-Glo lycra, breath reeking of Horlicks: the (old) boot-camp theory of ageing. Nobody remembers the ancient Greek adage ‘Call no man happy until he is dead’ – on the grounds that life could throw any number of spanners into the ointment before the curtain fell, and the later it fell, the more intense the hail of spanners. That said, a newspaper announced as I write that life is shortened by drinking more than a bottle of wine a week. What splendid news for all!

This book contains a rich melange of ancient sources about old age and death. It concentrates on the Romans, but they (as they acknowledged) were in heavy cultural debt to the Greeks; so Homer, Plato, the physician Hippocrates and Aristotle have walk-on parts too. Seneca, the Roman philosopher and millionaire adviser to Emperor Nero, wrote copiously and at length on these topics, while the statesman and thinker Cicero, the keen letter-writer and senator Pliny the Younger, the Greek essayist Plutarch (writing in Roman times) and a huge range of Latin epitaphs will also feature large.

It will rapidly become clear that, thanks to the ancients, with their usual unwavering eye fixed firmly on the world as it is, all the problems associated with old age and death that so transfix us today were dealt with two millennia ago. But that only raises the question: is the modern world capable of facing the world as it is? Memento mori means ‘remember you die’.

NOTES

One recent calculation concluded that 55 per cent of the Roman population lived at subsistence level, a maximum of 19 per cent just above it, and 10–22 per cent below it. Perhaps 5–10 per cent were in a relatively comfortable ‘middling’ group. That left the fabulously wealthy, highly educated elite at about 0.5 per cent of the population. It is their voices that dominate our sources, and so our perception of the Roman world. And those voices were effectively all male.

According to one statistic, one third of UK families live in poverty. On the grounds that in the ancient world subsistence was about the best one could hope for (and still is in parts of the modern world), a Roman might have said that far fewer Romans did (only 10–22 per cent).*

‘Freedmen’ refers to slaves that had been freed, and therefore became Roman citizens, a remarkably common occurrence in Rome. They maintained close connections with their ‘patron’, i.e. the owner who freed them.

* It ought to be pointed out that living in poverty in the United Kingdom is defined as living on less than 60 per cent of the median wage. Since it is likely that there will always be some people living at that level, there will nearly always be people automatically defined as ‘poor’. But I add that, mathematically, it is possible for that not to be the case.

Chapter One

LIFESPAN

HOW LONG DID ROMANS LIVE?

The ‘ancient world’ in this book will cover the period from c. 700 BC, when the West’s first literature appeared in Greece, to the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, i.e. roughly AD 500. During that time we have examples of people living to over 100. That is entirely possible. What is much more difficult to decide is the normal life expectation across the whole population.

Below are given the UK statistics for 2015. Those are the sorts of figures we would love to have for the ancient world. But though Romans did take censuses of male citizens and their property every five years, they appear only patchily in our sources.

Then again, about 100,000 tomb inscriptions (epitaphs) survive. These are extremely interesting for all sorts of reasons, recording everyone from consuls to slaves to professional buffoons. But they are unreliable for census purposes, because they are too selective, being dominated by adult males. The same is true of written records – as will become clear.

UK STATISTICS

Our ‘census’ is taken over from Latin census, ‘registration’. In Rome, this information was used to classify male citizens for class, military and tax purposes.

In the United Kingdom the Office for National Statistics produces an annual population count. In 2015, out of a population of 65.1 million:

•   1.5 million were above 85 (2.3 per cent)

•   11.6 million were over 65 (17.8 per cent)

•   23.6 million were over 50 (36.2 per cent)

•   There are now more people in the UK over 65 than there are under 18

•   Half a million were over 90 (70 per cent of them women)

•   The life expectancy at birth for females is 82.8, and for males 79.1

•   A girl born in 2011 has a 1 in 3 chance, a boy a 1 in 4 chance, of living to 100

•   The median age is now 40, the highest it has ever been ‘Median age’ is not the average age: it means the age at which half the population is younger, half older.

The latest figures for 2016 show a small increase on all these figures: for example, total population 65.6 million, over-85s 2.4 per cent, and so on.

ROMAN TOMBSTONES: AN IMPOSSIBLE PICTURE

The Roman Empire at its height numbered perhaps 60 million; the total of lives over the c. 500 years during which the Empire survived, far more. From this period we have recovered c. 100,000 funerary inscriptions from across the Roman world. This looks like vital evidence for demographic purposes, i.e. describing the size, structure and distribution of the population. But for that purpose it is, in fact, largely useless.

DODGY STATS

There are 10,697 epitaphs from Roman North Africa. These yield the following statistics:

26.5 per cent (2,835) lived to 70 or over;

2.96 per cent (313) to 100 or over; and

0.25 per cent (27) to 120 or over.

Now look at the UK statistics. It seems unlikely that (given diet, disease, medical understanding, etc.) Roman North Africa’s ancient population could have so easily outlived today’s UK population.

DODGIER STATS

In one region of North Africa tombstone data from 1,258 individuals would suggest that:

The average life expectancy was 60.2;

39.3 per cent (494 people) were over 70; but only

0.5 per cent (6) were under 10!

This is obviously absurd and confirms the point about the unreliability of epitaphs as evidence for age statistics. The fact is that tombstones marked the death of someone precious. So they could not add up to a serious record of a whole society’s age range or life expectancy. If they told one anything, it would be about why the deceased was important to the family or friends who paid for the monument to be put up.

Finally, when one does collate the information from all of them and try to draw demographic conclusions, the result describes a society the like of which has never existed anywhere at any time: a high preponderance of males over females, and very few babies (calculations vary from 0.4 per cent to 1.3 per cent!).

WRITTEN RECORDS

Pliny the Elder’s 37-volume encyclopedia (Natural History) of the Roman world survives complete. One section was devoted to human longevity. Apart from the obviously mythical or transparently dodgy, he mentioned a few over-100s: a man who lived to 108, and a woman to 115 (she also bore 15 children). The actress Galeria Copiola appeared on stage aged 104 to celebrate Augustus’ recovery from illness in AD 8. Nothing wrong with that: it is entirely feasible that very rare individuals did live to such an advanced age.

DODGIER WRITTEN RECORDS

Pliny quoted a census from AD 74. One might expect serious information from such a source. But using the census from one region of Italy, Pliny reported that:

81 people survived into their 100s, including

4 up to 135 or 137; and

3 up to 140.

This strains credulity somewhat. The reason may possibly be that all the people quoted were born before Augustus introduced a system of birth registration, set up in AD 4 and AD 9. How, therefore, the census could have been certain of their birth dates is not clear.

ROMAN LIFE EXPECTANCY

Epitaphs and written records do not give us any demographic help. What, then, can we do? Make a best guess is the answer, with the help of reliable life statistics from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These life statistics, gathered from very different cultures all over the world, are used by insurance companies to work out the likelihood of this sort of person with this sort of lifestyle at this age (etc.) living for – how much longer? Scholars proceed as follows:

First, the birth and death rate of any ancient population we know about must have been of such a sort as to create a stable society. That means enough children survived for long enough to have children themselves. If that was not the case, the society would have died out.

Second, scholars make a guess at the average age expectancy of the population: in this case, our guess is about twenty-five years. Why? Because lower than twenty and the society would have died out; but to get it above thirty, the ancients would need to have had a far better understanding of illness, hygiene, diet (etc.) than they did (see p. 66). Further, the evidence from the written record as a whole – including, for example, tax records, legal texts, censuses and so on – does not make it wildly unlikely that an average life expectancy of about twenty-five years is wrong.

So, making those assumptions, scholars ask the question: what would be the life expectancy of a stable society whose average age was twenty-five?

WORLD RECORDS

Coale-Demeny life tables were constructed in 1966 by the Americans Ansley Coale and Paul Demeny. They were derived from 192 life tables based on a range of statistical records, some before 1900, some after the Second World War. Of those tables, 176 came from Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand and a sprinkling of the rest from Africa, Asia, Japan, etc.

On the strength of those records, it is assumed that in the ancient world – bar peaks and troughs for special circumstances – conclusions can be drawn about the lifespans of a stable population whose age expectancy was twenty-five. Of course, while the percentages given accurately reflect the statistics, they are far too precise to reflect the reality of the very different regions of the ancient world.

LESS DODGY STATS

Current best guesses about the ancient world derived from life tables suggest:

About a third of babies died within a month or so of birth; about half would be dead by the age of 5. Disease, bad diet and poor hygiene would be the main killers.

c. 50 per cent of the population was 20 or under.

Nearly 80 per cent was dead by 50.

What a nightmare – a world dominated by teenagers! Contrast nowadays, where over 20 per cent of the population is 65 and over – actually more than the number under 18.

HOW MANY MORE YEARS TO LIVE?

Imagine a cohort of 100,000 Roman babies born at the same time.

At age 1 – 65,000 would be alive; at age 5 – 50,000; at age 10 – 48,000; at age 20 – 43,500; at age 30 – 36,500; at age 40 – 30,000; at age

50 – 21,000; at age 60 – 13,000; at 70 – 5,500.

AN INFORMED ANCIENT GUESS

A Roman lawyer called Ulpian (c. AD 170–223) produced a practical life table of his own. Its purpose is not clear: it has been suggested that it was used to calculate the value of maintenance bequests left in wills. It is clearly unscientific, but the results look roughly along the right lines:

Current age

Further years expected

Up to 19

30

20–24

28

25–29

25

30–34

22

35–39

20

40–49

19, reducing by 1 year annually to 10

50–54

9

55–59

7

60 and over

5

WOMEN TAKE THE STRAIN

A high death rate is usually matched by high fertility, and it needed to be if the Roman population was to remain stable. Given widowhood, sterility, divorce and so on, every woman would have had to give birth to between 6 and 9 children to keep up replacement levels. Here are three grim examples of family loss:

The epitaph of one Veturia recorded that she died aged 27 after 16 years of marriage, having lost 5 of her 6 children.

The political reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and their sister Sempronia (second century BC) were the only three siblings to survive out of nine.

The emperor Marcus Aurelius and his wife Faustina had 13 children. Marcus died in AD 180. Only 5 of his children survived him.

DEMOGRAPHICS AND THE PATERFAMILIAS

A feature of Roman life that Romans saw as unique to themselves was the position of the paterfamilias, early Latin for the ‘father’ (pater) of the ‘household’ (familia). This was the belief that the paterfamilias had complete authority over everyone and everything in his household. He was the master of family, persons and property, to such an extent that one could own nothing over which the paterfamilias did not have total control right up until the moment of his death. This could raise the faintly absurd prospect of a paterfamilias living to, say, 85 (like Cato the Elder) and continuing to rule over sons and grandsons who were consuls! But as the age statistics suggest, c. 70 per cent of sons would be fatherless by the age of 25, and 95 per cent would be by the age of 40. So if there was a problem with Papa, it would not last long. One consequence would be many underage children living with relatives or under guardianship.

THE LIVING FAMILY

Latin had names for grandfather/mother going up to great-greatgreat-great-grandfather/mother. But living grandparents rarely featured in the literature. The reason is that (as the full tables show) by the age of ten a Roman had only a 50-50 chance of having any grandparents alive; a Roman aged twenty would have less than a 1 in 100 chance of having their paternal grandfather still alive, women being slightly more long-lived.

So, although grandparents from the mother’s side would be more common, grandparents generally were not a big presence in Roman children’s lives. An exception was the mother of Quintilian, whose young wife died at 19, leaving granny with the main job of raising their two sons – both of whom died young (see p. 51).