Sixty Over the Bridge: Growing Old as a Man in Rome

A common howler among my weaker students is the delightful Rome had a high mortality rate. I think I know what they mean: more people died young. The mortality rate, then as now, was 100 per cent. The Greek myth of Endymion, granted immortality but not eternal youth, would have made the concept unwelcome to those who knew of it.

Bust of an Old Man

 More people died young. For Roman citizens, especially in the Republic, death in a military context would have been a good possibility for males, while childbirth and post partum disease would have cut a swathe through the young female population as it did well into the twentieth century and still does in poor countries. Women are too important to be a footnote here and need to be dealt with in their own blog piece, to follow.

Many diseases we face today are those of old age. When people died younger, they died of different things. Diseases of human degeneration hardly existed. We do read of certain individuals dying of cancer – the emperor Constantius III had what may have been bowel cancer over several months in AD421. He was 51. The empress Theodora also died of cancer at the age of 48 (Victor of Tonnena, Chronicle s.a.548). As Cancer Research UK has often commented, 75% of cancer cases are in people over sixty, and if very few people made it to sixty in antiquity, we should expect the incidence to be lower anyway.

Most ancient societies found a role for those (mainly men) who didn’t die young. The Roman Senate emerges in the semi-legendary period following the expulsion of the kings (Regifugium). Consuls of the Roman Revolution, Lucius Junius Brutus and Titus Lucretius Tricipitinus had grown-up children. It is given that the rape of the latter’s daughter, Lucretia, provoked the rebellion, while the sons of Brutus, as in the famous modern painting, were executed for fighting alongside the ex-king. So the Consuls were probably in their forties or fifties.

The Latin word Senatus derives from senex/ senis ‘Old Man’; for a modern reader, learning that you could be considered an old man at just forty is sobering. But even in the supposedly stable period of the High Republic, Titus Flamininus was elected consul directly from quaestor at the age of thirty. Since men were not considered fully adult until twenty five, this was rapid and shown how narrow a window Roman males had for advancement – not below 25, over at 60.

Bust of an Old Man (looking remarkably like Iggy Pop)

We have few statistics for lifespan in antiquity; social order differences, whether you lived mostly in the city or on a country estate, occupation, all would make for major differences. Even the life of a slave could range from those working as field hands on Roman latifundia (nasty, brutish and short) to the high-status slave of a rich owner (probably living longer and better fed than a free person of the social underclass at Rome depending on bread doles in the Subura).

As Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence point out, we know more about the life stages of slime moulds than we do of people in antiquity (Growing Up and Growing Old in the Roman Empire, 2001). As humans have not changed genetically since long before the Roman period, the lifespan of people should be identical to what it was in (say) 1750, before we started inhaling coal smoke on a large scale. And in general it is. However, antiquity had few cures for childhood disease and frequent famines.

When we get inscriptions on tombstones and other monuments in the ‘pagan’ era, there is a lot of precision given much of the time, with dates and precise ages provided, not just years and months, but also days and hours of life. However, Christians scorned precise ages. ‘He was about fifty’ is the Christian style, designed to suggest that such things don’t matter, because, hey, the world’s going to end very soon. Early Christian millennial thinking is however undermined because the concept of any kind of monument is contrary to it.

Roman culture, backed up in some instances by law, specifies the age of sixty for old age. Men aged sixty and above weren’t eligible for military service or jury duty; while that may have been welcome, they also lost the right to vote in elections under the Republic. There was a saying ‘Sixty over the bridge’, the bridge being the passage through the voting booths on the Campus Martius. Once the empire was established, few things were voted on anyway and the Campus Martius was built over.

Senators aged sixty were no longer obliged to attend the Senate, and the same rule applied for decurions and their local curia in the various cities of the empire. That age seems to have been adopted as a norm across the empire.

Full length statue of an Old Man

We have two major Roman texts on old age: Cicero De Senectute (On Old Age), a work from the middle of the first century BC, and the Letters to Lucilius of Seneca, some 110 years later.

Cicero’s work is phrased as a conversation among Cato the Elder, Laelius and Scipio (son of Africanus). Cato praises influence as a benefit of old age, since the Senate called members to speak in order of their age, so those who were oldest spoke first (De Senectute 18).

Marcus Tullius Cicero; contemporary bust

Physical decay is acknowledged as an issue in a speech given to Cato:

But, the critics say, old men are morose, troubled, fretful, and hard to please; and, if we inquire, we shall find that some of them are misers, too. However, these are faults of character, not of age. Yet moroseness and the other faults mentioned have some excuse, not a really sufficient one, but such as it may seem possible to allow, in that old men imagine themselves ignored, despised, and mocked at; and besides, when the body is weak, the lightest blow gives pain. (Cicero De Senectute 18.65).

But this is a philosophical tract, dedicated to Cicero’s friend Atticus. It doesn’t pretend to be read as reality.

Seneca writes more tellingly:

Wherever I turn, I see evidences of my advancing years. I visited lately my country-place, and protested against the money which was spent on the tumble-down building. My bailiff maintained that the flaws were not due to his own carelessness; "he was doing everything possible, but the house was old." And this was the house which grew under my own hands! What has the future in store for me, if stones of my own age are already crumbling? I was angry, and I embraced the first opportunity to vent my spleen in the bailiff's presence. "It is clear," I cried, "that these plane-trees are neglected; they have no leaves. Their branches are so gnarled and shrivelled; the boles are so rough and unkempt! This would not happen, if someone loosened the earth at their feet, and watered them." The bailiff swore by my protecting deity that "he was doing everything possible, and never relaxed his efforts, but those trees were old." Between you and me, I had planted those trees myself, I had seen them in their first leaf.

Then I turned to the door and asked: "Who is that broken-down dotard? You have done well to place him at the entrance; for he is outward bound. Where did you get him? What pleasure did it give you to take up for burial some other man's dead? But the slave said: "Don't you know me, sir? I am Felicio; you used to bring me little images. My father was Philositus the steward, and I am your pet slave." "The man is clean crazy," I remarked. "Has my pet slave become a little boy again? But it is quite possible; his teeth are just dropping out." (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Letters to Lucilius 12)

Seneca; probably contemporary

He returns to the physical impairments of age in another letter:

Nevertheless, I offer thanks to myself, with you as witness; for I feel that age has done no damage to my mind, though I feel its effects on my constitution. Only my vices, and the outward aids to these vices, have reached senility; my mind is strong and rejoices that it has but slight connexion with the body. It has laid aside the greater part of its load. It is alert; it takes issue with me on the subject of old age; it declares that old age is its time of bloom. (Lucius Annaeus Seneca Letters to Lucilius 26)

Seneca died at his own hand aged 68, at the instigation of Nero. It is quite likely that he would have lived in to greater old age without that impetus. Again, this is philosophy to console someone in old age.

Plutarch

Similar sentiments can be read in one of Plutarch’s Moralia essays:

For granted that nature seeks in every way pleasure and enjoyment, old men are physically incapacitated for all pleasures except a few necessary ones, and not only as Euripides says, but their appetites also for food and drink are for the most part blunted and toothless, so that they can, if I may say so, hardly whet and sharpen them. They ought to prepare for themselves pleasures in the mind, not ignoble and illiberal ones like that of Simonides, who said to those who reproached him for his avarice that, since old age had deprived him of all other pleasures, he was comforting his declining years with the only one left, the pleasure of gain. (Plutarch ‘Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs’ 5).

This is of course an entirely aristocratic view, and of the 100 million souls in the Roman Empire, only a couple of thousand ever had the wealth to contemplate the merits of old age. Most were working till they dropped.

How many people in the empire had read the works of Cicero, Seneca or Plutarch?  Probably very few indeed. It would be generous to say one per cent; only a tiny number had the leisure time (otium) to do so. Probably a larger number had read the Sayings of Publius Syrus, a popular work because it comprised simple maxims written or compiled by a first century BC Syrian author, known and admired by Julius Caesar. Here’s a selection:

1. As men, we are all equal in the presence of death.

55. He has existed only, not lived, who lacks wisdom in old age

68. What greater evil could you wish a miser than long life?

105. A death that ends the ills of life is a blessing.

158. He who longs for death confesses that life is a failure.

324. Man’s life is a loan, not a gift.

566. There is no more shameful sight than an old man commending life.

1087. Man’s life is short and therefore an honourable death is his immortality.

Publius Syrus

There are maxims ranging from the profound to the frankly bizarre, and while they offer cracker barrel philosophy, they were more likely to be known to ordinary people than ever the works of the greats.

This is also a male view. The worth of women dropped once they had passed childbearing age. The wergilds of Dark Age women reflected that, so it may be the case that they were following common imperial practice. The life course of women is better the subject of its own blog piece.

Turn Left to Triumph: The Meta Sudans of Rome

The Meta Sudans is one of the oddest monuments in the city of Rome. I’ll bet most have never heard of it. It’s hard to think what purpose it served. The word /meta/ can mean finishing-point, goalpost, turning point and similar terms. It’s connected with the Greek word ‘meta’ (μετά) where it has the sense of being the end-point of something. But the Greek is a bound morpheme, usually used as prefix, where the Latin is a simple noun. There is some indication that the Etruscans had metae before the Romans, and, as they had an orientalising culture, the connotation of the word may have shifted somewhat, from abstract to concrete.

The Meta Sudans – the sweating cone – stood in Region IV ‘Templum Pacis’, the Temple of Peace. This was a mixture of monumental architecture and down-at -heel housing. It included the ancient Temple of Jupiter Stator and the Subura, one of those areas referred to today as ‘bustling and colourful’ when they mean ‘dangerous’. The district also included the Colossal Statue, but not the  Flavian Amphitheatre (amphitheatrum qui capit loca LXXXVII), which is in Region III ‘Isis et Serapis’, so the boundary of the two regions of the city must have been between the two locations. Quite probably the Meta Sudans was used as a boundary stone.

Topper and Ashby’s Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (1929) suggests it was the common marker for Regions I, (Porta Capena) II, (Caelemontium) III, IV and X (Palatium). There are many places in England where several counties conjoin, and there are ten ‘three shire stones’, so it may have served a similar function. Indeed, it may have served a number of functions; we can imagine the senior vicomagister of each city district affected by a Triumph meeting here to plan the events. There may have been other metae in Rome, for it to need an adjective to determine it.

We can see it newly built in a coin of Titus (r. AD79-81), just to the left of the Flavian Amphitheatre (the Colosseum to you and me).  On the coin, it is spurting water rather than sweating or oozing it. By AD354, when the Chronographer itemised the things to be seen in Rome, it certainly had the name (metam sudantem, in the Accusative case).

Sestertius of Titus, showing the Meta Sudans, left

The term ‘meta sudans’ existed before it was built under the Flavians, since as Bill Thayer points out in his as always first rate Lacus Curtius site, it’s referred to in a letter from Seneca to his friend Luculius (aut hunc qui ad Metam Sudantem tubulas experitur et tibias, nec cantat sed exclamat; Seneca Epistulae Morales 4.56) with regard to one at Baiae. This does not mean that the one in Rome was created with that name, as it might have inherited it when it changed to a slighter flow later in antiquity.

There not being such a monument during the life of Seneca (and thus of Nero), yet it was already functioning during the brief reign of Titus, suggests that it was constructed during the decade of Vespasian’s reign. Perhaps it can be related to the Domus Aurea of Nero, which included an artificial lake, created by the engineers Celer and Severus to create a delightful rus in urbe; we could not rule out a purely functional purpose, to regulate hydraulic pressure for Nero’s lake. As that was rapidly dismantled, perhaps the Meta Sudans as we had it until 1936 was prettified and made to be part of a monumental assemblage, because it could not be removed without flooding the area.

The Cloaca Maxima in 1814, oil painting by CW Eckersberg

We can see from nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs than there wasn’t much left. The coin of Titus suggests a high-pressure flow, which did not exist in later centuries, and which was heavily reduced in antiquity. One possibility was that it was used as a safety valve for the water flows from the nearby hills; with heavy rains and rising groundwater flowing off, it could be opened to produce the column of water seen on the coin.

Colourised (perhaps hand-tinted) scene in 1890; maybe a postcard

Victorian photograph of a distant Meta Sudans by the Arch of Titus

Meta Sudans seen through the 250 years later Arch of Constantine

Any large city depends utterly on water flowing, and this was as true for Rome as it was for Los Angeles in the film Chinatown. Rulers, to be seen as benefactors, will want to mark their munificence by a flow of water beyond the level of need. It may have been intended primarily to impress people, in the manner of the Emperor Fountain at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. This was created by constructing a lake in the Peaks seen behind the house, generating enough water pressure for the fountain to reach nearly 300 feet on demand.

Emperor Fountain (1844) with the South Face of Chatsworth House, the Derbshire home of the Cavendish family, Dukes of Devonshire

The valley in which the Meta Sudans is (or was) located was the original thoroughfare of Rome, the via sacra. The various communities which made up early Rome used that road for processions, notably for funerals; Polybius comments on how important those were. By the time the Meta Sudans was built, processions along the via sacra would have passed underneath the Arch of Titus and then turned left past the Colossus (which the Chronographer notes as ’The colossal statue, 102 feet high. On its head are 7 rays each 22 feet long’.  This was a crowded, low-lying poor area area, which in AD354 had 2,757 insulae and only 88 houses. The water pressure had to process 75 bath houses, 78 cisterns and the Baths of Daphne; the latter may be associated with the statue of Apollo (Apollinem sandaliarum) in that district; Daphne was a water nymph pursued by Apollo, and is one of the first myths Ovid recites in his Metamorphoses.

Computer Reconstruction of the Meta Sudans (see the coin of Titus)

Sadly, the Meta Sudans was demolished at the orders of Mussolini in 1936; by then, as can be seen in these illustrations, it had collapsed into a small stump. There is no sign then of cultural protests like those against ISIS for attacking Palmyra today.