We Are Dying, But We Laugh

The appearance at Rome of celibacy and childlessness towards the end of the republic and their continuance under the empire, is a well-known phenomenon. It began, of course, among the upper classes. The old ancestor-worship had long before broken down, and with it the religious duty to continue one’s line of descent, while the economic reasons for desiring children were by now converted into reasons for not desiring them. The old religious form of marriage, which put the wife and the property that came with her in the husband’s hands and put him under obligation to care for her and bound the two together almost indissolubly, were abandoned by the upper classes, who adopted another laxer form of marriage which had been in use among the plebs and which corresponds somewhat with our civil marriage, which left the wife and her property out of the husband’s manus and under ‘the tutelage of her father or after his death of a guardian of her own choice, and thus practically left her her own mistress, emancipated, free. 

It was a species of free love, easy to contract, and easy to dissolve, so that divorce became common, as also remarriage: Seneca, indeed, wrote sarcastically of high-born ladies reckoning the years, not by the consuls, but by their husbands. Men and women stood over against each other as though independent and equal, each having his or her own occupations, interests, amusements. There appeared, too, the demand with which we today are familiar, for the same morality of the two sexes; which means the morality of the male. In such conditions children were not wanted. Even the elder Cato, who in most things was conservative, had recommended to the patricians not to have many children, so as to avoid partitioning their estates. Beside the old method of getting rid of them when born, which was becoming discredited and was retained principally for abnormalities, new means were discovered of preventing birth and even conception.” The, children the ladies of quality did have, they of course did not themselves tend, that being left to servants. The maternal instincts of women were satisfied by substitutes: a Christian Father tells us that heathen ladies “maintain parrots and curlews; they do not receive the orphan child, but they expose the children that are born at home and take up the young of birds, preferring irrational to rational creatures.”

Many men did not marry at all, as it was still easier to enjoy free love without contracting so much as this loose tie. To marry a poor woman still left her beyond control; but to marry a rich woman gave the control to her, and according to Juvenal nothing was more intolerable than a rich wife. The bachelor or the childless widower, moreover, was courted and flattered by those who hankered after legacies, while the father of a family was left to himself. The old aristocratic families, to whom so much of the glory of Rome had been due, were dying out, and their places in the senate had to be supplied by men from the lower ranks and by foreigners from the provinces.

Augustus took early measures with a view to stop the evil, and the lex Julia et Papia Poppaea was passed. In the olden days celibacy had been a criminal offence against religion and the state. So far the public sentiment of the new times would not go; wherefore civil discouragement of celibacy and encouragement of marriage were resorted to instead. The un-married were deprived of the right to receive bequests, and the childless married were permitted to take only half; while fathers of three children were given advantages in elections and appointments to office and were freed from certain impositions. The law was not strictly enforced, many exemptions being granted. It did not accomplish its purpose; but whether it did not to some extent retard the evil, we cannot know. It stood on the statute-book for three centuries, and was repealed by the first Christian emperor, to whom celibacy was preached as a virtue of perfection. Meanwhile the evil had been extending downward through the middle classes, and from the center at Rome outward. We have seen how many escapes from the burdens that weighed upon the curials of the towns were cut off by decrees of the emperors. One loophole which a little civil discrimination could not stop up, remained, at least for posterity, since the living could abstain from marriage or go without children; which they more and more did. When wars and plagues devastated a region, the population did not respond and spring back to fill the vacant places, but the emptiness remained. Such a plague occurred in Italy in the days of Aurelius, which passed the skill of the physicians to cure, and occasioned a recrudescence of the worship of the healing gods, such as Apollo and Aesculapius, giving a boost also to Christianity and to various mesmeric superstitions, and thereby weakened the art of medicine in the matters wherein it could offer assistance. Before the barbarians invaded Italy one-eighth of the once fertile Campania was desert and uncultivated land, which the emperor released from the payment of taxes. Even the offer of abandoned land free and untaxed did not succeed in inviting cultivators.

Greece was another center of depopulation, having in fact, reached that condition long before, in her own period of decline, when men preferred hetairae to wives, and advanced women chose that condition. At Athens, which had passed out of its ascending into its culminating period about the time of the Persian wars, at its climax under Pericles there was a woman movement, led by Aspasia (an early Mary Wollstonecraft), who was succeeded by Plato (an early John Stuart Mill), and as Athens declined, women became freer. Then the dramatists, beginning with Euripides, advised against marriage, emphasizing the burden of a poor wife and the slavery to a rich one, and laying particular stress upon the inconvenience of having children. Then the philosophers took up the same strain, and matrimony was frowned upon, or only, tolerated, by many of them, such as Democritus, Theophrastus, and Epicurus; while the Cynic Diogenes and even the Stoic Zeno recommended promiscuity, and Crates advised his son to have intercourse only with harlots and gave his daughter to his pupils for a month on trial.

Within two centuries the result was apparent. At the time of their fall and subjection to the Romans, Polybius wrote that it was useless for the Greeks to appeal to the gods to repeople their deserted cities and fields, since the cause was evident and the remedy in their own hands. Theirs was a population given over entirely to pride, to avarice, and to idleness; who were unwilling either to marry or, if marrying, to rear the children born to them, or at most but one or two, in order to leave them the greatest wealth and to bring them up in the lap of luxury, with the result that, one or both of the children dying through some mishap, the houses became more and more solitary and the cities lost their power. All that was needed, he naïvely added, was for people to change their ways, or to pass a law requiring parents to rear their children. Nothing of the sort was done. A few isolated philosophers, indeed, exhorted the people to marry and to rear children, and many of them, for the sake of the state and the gods; and tried to persuade them that it was better for a child to have many brothers than a large inheritance. But in vain; and Greece never recovered her former populousness and strength.

The evil days did come to all, bringing wars which the people now coupled with famine and pestilence as intolerable scourges, no longer seeking occasion for fighting as their ancestors had done, but shuddering when it was forced upon them; for they stood on the defensive, with no glory or booty to gain, and their ease and comfort were at stake. “If the peace of the world could corrupt great souls,” wrote Longinus in the latter half of the third century, “much more does so the interminable war which now oppresses us, and especially the sentiments which direct the present age; for the love of money with which we are all contaminated and the love of pleasure lead us into slavery and overwhelm our lives, the one disease making us petty, the other vile”; and he added that he was unable to find how such evils were to be avoided by people “who honored wealth infinitely, and even deified it.”

A couple of centuries more, and Salvianus, likewise recognizing with Juvenal that the vices from which the Roman world was suffering had originated in the long peace,” similarly perceived that the horrors to which they were exposed rendered the Romans still more depraved. The Romans in Gaul, in Spain, and elsewhere, he admitted to be more vicious than the barbarians who were conquering them. They had begun to be so when pagans, and did not cease to be so when they became Christians. And the Christians added one more vice, the most dangerous of all; for they raised weakness to a cult. “Saintly men,” says Salvianus, himself approving, “make themselves feeble, because if they were strong they could with difficulty be saintly. If the Apostle Paul thought he had to seek infirmity of body, who would wisely avoid it? If he feared strength of flesh, who would rationally presume to be strong? For this reason men dedicated to Christ both are and wish to be weak.” Naturally, with this failing, and with its treatment of all men and women as brothers and sisters, and its consequent confusion of the sexes, its want of patriotism, and, also springing from its disregard of the morrow on earth, its advocacy of celibacy, Christianity could do nothing to stem the decay. Public virtue was not its affair: it enjoined only charity to the poor. What was the ruination of the world to those who expected soon to be in paradise!

In Tacitus’s time the “inertness” of the pagan Gauls was proverbial. It was ten times worse now that they were Christians. According to Salvianus again, after Treves had been sacked three times, the principal men petitioned the emperor to restore the circus entertainments; and when it was captured a fourth time, they were carousing and did not desist even as the barbarians entered the city. At Carthage, in Africa, while it was being taken by the Vandals, the Christian Romans were luxuriating in the theatres. We are dying, Salvianus remarked bitterly, but we laugh: hence everywhere tears follow our laughter. At Rome the utter idleness and vacancy of life, given up wholly to the chase after pleasure, is well depicted in the pages of Ammianus Marcellinus. He comments on the well-lighted streets at night, imitating day; the speed of the vehicles of the rich, endangering the lives of pedestrians; the prevalence of music over other forms of art; the honors paid to actors and dancers; the care of one’s health, and the segregation of the diseased; the popular discussions on the merits of racers; the superciliousness of the rich toward strangers, whom they welcomed effusively one day and forgot the next. The Christian bishop was the first man in the city; he was often enriched by gifts from women; his election was sometimes at the cost of bloodshed. The old military art of dancing had long before become soft and debilitated. The delicacy and effeminacy of the city-bred men showed itself exteriorly in the use of fine raiment and ointments, in the shaving of the face and ‘even the depilation of the whole body. At Carthage things were even worse. There and throughout Roman Africa, people were said to have all the vices in a superior degree. Many men became women in face, walk, and dress; and what Clement of Alexandria called “preposterous Venus” was practiced openly. As for the women, matrons could not by their dress be distinguished from courtesans. Among other things revived today, they dyed their hair yellow. In general, “luxury has deranged everything,” a Christian Father complained: “men play the part of women, and women that of men, contrary to nature; women are at once wives and husbands; and their promiscuous lechery is a public institution.”

These conditions, summed up under the term “luxury,” led to childlessness, especially among the upper classes, who, having abundance of other pleasures, avoided the trouble of having children, preferring to use up their capital themselves or at least not to divide what remained. Thus the upper classes left the world to the lower classes—that is, the Roman world, till the barbarians came in and took it; for to the only men who might have saved it, if such there were, it was not worth saving, and those men and women who benefited by it were incapable of saving it. Then all the Romans practically became equal again in subjection and poverty, and the natural inequality of the sexes reappeared in a reign of violence.

-excerpted from “The Climax of Civilization” By Correa Moylan Walsh (1917)