14.3 Europe: 100 b.c. to 0  (Page 3/5)

Marc Antony, who had shared a consulship with Caesar, considered himself the sole heir of Caesar and he, with the latter's nephew, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (later Octavian) and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, who had followed Sulla as consul, all together formed the Second Triumvirate. Publicly the purpose of this association was to avenge the death of Caesar but actually it merely set up power bases for Antony and Octavian. Inevitably they could not abide each other and the quarrels terminated with the Battle of Actium off the Greek coast in 31 B.C. with Octavian winning and subsequently ruling alone as emperor, called Augustus. The people accepted his dictatorship because they had been faring so poorly under the previous senatorial oligarchy. A reign of peace, another "Golden Age", resulted.

Before this time the Romans had raised armies only for specific tasks, disbanding them after the mission was accomplished, but Augustus created a standing army of 25 legions with the equivalent of another, the Praetorian Guard, in Italy as his personal protection. Of the others, 8 legions were stationed along the Rhine, 3 along the Danube in the Balkan area, 4 in the Yugoslav territory, 4 in Syria and Lebanon, 2 each in Egypt and Portugal, and one each in northern Spain and Carthage. Each legion contained 5,000 men divided into 10 cohorts of 480 each.

In spite of the "Golden Age", the relief roles had again built up in Rome to 320,000 so that just under one-third of the population had to receive free government grain to exist. It took some 14 million bushels of grain each year just to supply the city itself where 1,500,000 citizens lived, housed in some 46,600 insulae (apartment blocks) three to eight stories high, made of wood, rubble and brick. Windows were simply wall openings and were covered with shutters or hangings. Only the rich had wells or taps into the city conduits; the rest got water from public fountains. There were public lavatories and toilet receptacles which were frequently emptied into the street. Menial work was done by about 2,000,000 slaves, a middle class citizen owning about eight while the rich might have up to one thousand and an emperor twenty thousand. Slaves made up 35% of the population of Italy. (Ref. 249 ) Livy stated that it was common for Roman orators to state that "--Jews, Syrians, Lydians, Medes, indeed all Asiatics are born to slavery"

NOTE: INSERT Map 30: ROME 100 B.C.

Hellenic culture continued to pour into Rome and literature and art took new dignity.Cicero, Catullus, Virgil, Horace and Livius the historian, all translated and adjusted Greek learning to the Latin tongue. A great philosophical poem, giving the views of Democritus and Epicurus was written by Lucretius, the Roman Epicurean, during this century. The wealthy hired Greek nurses and teachers for their children. The Roman physicians of this period were chiefly Greeks or at least Greek-trained. Asclepiades, originally of Bithynia, developed a high reputation as a physician and was a friend of Cicero and Lucretius. He abandoned the old Hippocrates doctrine of the four humors and felt that the physician, not nature, cured disease. Most Roman practitioners were either freedmen or slaves. (Ref. 48 , 21 , 1 , 28 , 136 , 125 , 185 , 91 )