I found it, also you are very correct AOD hehe. I just had to look back about three pages.
Life: 5.5
Mind: 6.7
Spirit: 7
Friends/Family 2.4
Love: 0
Finance: 2.4
EDIT: I interrupted quite the discussion didn't I? Should I voice my opinion? I think I will.
EDIT2: So I have this book called Daily Life in Ancient Rome. I always wondered why I left it sitting on my handsome red cabinet not being read by me. I suppose I will page through it and support both of your arguments that, yes, the Romans were some assholes and that Jesus was probably right in in sticking his neck out to try to change some stuff for all I know and yet he had to play by the barbaric (irony) rules of the day.
EDIT3: (From
Daily Life in Ancient Rome, by Jerome Carcopino)
"Nor was this: they formed a barrier for autocracy against revolution. In the city there were 150,000 complete idlers supported by the generosity of the public assistance, and perhaps an equal number of workers who from one year's end to the other had no occupation after the hour of noon and yet were deprived of the right to devote their spare time to politics. The shows occupied the time of these people, procided a safety valve for their passions, distorted their instincts, and diverted their activity. A people that yawns is ripe for revolt. The Caesars saw to it that the Roman plebs suffered neither from hunger nor ennui. The spectacles were the great anodyne for their subjects' unemployment, and the sure instrument of their own absolutism. They shrewdly buttressed their power by surrounding the plebs with attentions and expending fabulous sums of money in the process."
More to follow in edits if no further posts are after me, or in a following post.
EDIT4: Chapter III SOCIETY AND SOCIAL CLASSES
I.ROMANS AND FOREIGNERS
At first sight Roman society appears to be divided into water-tight compartments and to bristle with barriers between class and class. All free-born men (ingenui), whether citizens of Rome or elsewhere, were in principle in a distinct category, radically seperated by their superiority of birth from the mass of slaves who were originally without rights, without guarentees, without personality, delivered over like a herd of brute beasts to the discretion of their master, and like a herd of beasts treated rather as inanimate objects than as sentient beings (res mancipi). Among the ingenui, again, there existed a profound distinction between the Roman citizen whom the law protected and the non-citizen who was merely subjected to the law. Finally the Roman citizens themselves were classified and their position on this ladder of rank determined by their fortunes.
Whereas under the republic there had been equality for all citizens before the law, in the empire of the second and third centuries a legal distinction arose which divided the citizen body into two classes: the 'honestiores' and the 'humiliores', also called plebeii or tenuiores. To the first class belonged Roman senators and knights with their families, soldiers and veterans with thier children, and men who held or had held municipal offices in towns and cities outside of Rome, with their descendants. All other citizens belonged to the second, and unless wealth or ability brought them into public office, they remained there.
The humiliores were subject to the most severe and humiliating punishments for infraction of the laws. They might be sent to the mines (ad metalla), thrown to the beasts in the amphitheatre, or crucified. The honestiores, on the other hand, enjoyed certain privileges. In case of grave misconduct, they were spared punishments which would tend to degrade their position in the eyes of the people and generally got off with banishment, relegation, or losing their property.
The two highest groups among the honestiores were known as "orders" (ordines) and were composed respectivly of senators and knights. The members of the lower or Equestrian Order had to possess a minumum of 400,000 sesterces (duuvnote: equivalent to $16,000 at the time of this book's printing {I assume the footnote
2 describes how they calculated this, probably something to do with gold}) If they were honoured by the confidence of the emperor they were then qualified to be given command of his auxiliary troops or to fulfill a certain number of civil functions reserved for them; they could become domanial or fiscal procurators, or governors of secondary provinces like those of the Alps or Mauretania. After Hadrian's time they could hold various posts in the imperial cabinet, and after Augustus they were eligible for any of the praefectures except that of praefectus urbi.
Next edit continues:
At the summit of the social scale was the Senatorial Order. A member of this order had to own at least 1,000,000 sesterces ($40,000). The emperor could at will appoint him to command his legions, to act as legate or proconsul in the most important provinces, to administer te chief services of the city, or to hold the highest posts in the priesthood. An ingenious hierarcgy gradually established barriers between the different ranks of the priveleged, and to make these demarcations more evident Harian bestowed on each variety its own exclusive title of nobility. Among the knights, "distinguished man" (vir perfectissimus) for a prefect-- unless he was a praetor, who was "most eminent" (vir eminentissimus), a title later restored by the Roman Church for the benefit of her cardinals; while the epithet "most famous" (vir carissimus) was reserved for the senator and his immediate relatives.
This exact and rigid system, whose ingenious variouns anticipate the elaborate hierarchy devised by Peter the Great, is paralleled by Napoeon's system of graded precedence in the army and the Legion of Honour. In Rome, where officers and functionaries came and went, it established a sort of social pyramid on the summit of which, midway between earth and heaven, the princeps was poised in lonely, incomparable majesty. (duuvnote: I think he means the emperor and ruling class were conveniently remote from the common people)
As his title indicates, the princeps was, in one sense, only the First of the Senate and of the People. In another sense, however, this primacy implied a difference not only of degree but of nature betwween himself and the rest of humanity. For the emperor, as incarnation of the law and guardian of the auspices, was closer to the gods than the ordinary human being, from whom he was seperated after his accession by his sacred character of "Augustus." He was the offspring of the the gods, and at death he would return to them after his apotheosis-- to be proclaimed divus himself in due course. In vain Trajan repudiated with scorn Domitian's claim to be addressed by the double title of "Master and God" (dominus et deus). He could not free himself from the toils of the cult which worshipped the imperial genius as represented in his person and which bound the incongrous federation of cities in East and West together in the universal empire (orbis Romanus). He had to endure hearing his decrees publicly hailed as "divine" by those whose wishes they fulfilled. (duuvnote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajan)
Next:
Thus Rome appears a world petrified under a theocratic aristocracy, an inflexible structure composed of innumerable seperate compartments. On closer examination we find, however, that the partitions were by no means water-tight, and that powerful equalitarian currents never ceased to circulate, continually stirring up and renewing the elements of a society whose divisions were far from isolated. Not even the imperial house was proof against these currents. When the Julian family became extinct on the death of Nero, the principate was no longer the monopoly of one predestined clan or even of the city. As Tacitus expressed it, "The secret of empire was now disclosed--- that an emperor could be made elsewhere than at Rome."
Not the blood of Caesar or of Augustus henceforth conferrred that principate, but the loyalty of the Legions. Vespasian, legate of the East, Trajan, legate of Germany, were carried to supreme power, the former by the acclamations of his troops, the latter by the fear his army inspired and the confidence he himself inspired. Both rose to the divine imperial throne because they had first seized the pwoer which had the empire in it's gift, differing in this from Caligula, Claudius, or Nero, whose claims to empire lay in their dynasty's divinity. The legionaries who proclaimed Vespasian, the senators who compelled Nerva to adopt Trajan, the general of the Rhine frontier, had carried through a revolution. Thenceforward, just as every corporal of Napoleon's Grand Army carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack, so every army chief was felt at Rome to be a potential candidate for the imperial crown, the attainment of which was the ultimate promotion accorded to the greatest Roman warrior.
We need, therefore, feel no surprise that at the time when this new idea of merit and advancement came to be applied to the imperial dignity it should circulate through the whole body of the empire to quicken and rejuvenate, Intercommunication was established on every side between nations and classes, bringing fresh air among them, drawing them together, fusing them. In proportion as the ius gentium, that is to say, the law applying to foreign nations, modelled itself more and more on the ius civile or law of the Roman citizen, and at the same time as philosophy taught the ius civile to take heed of the ius naturale (natural law), the distance between Roman and foreigner, between the citizen and the peregrini, was lessened. Whether by personal favour, by emancipation, or by mass naturalisations extended at one stroke either to a class of demobilised auxiliaries or to a municipality suddenly converted into an honorary colony, a new flood of peregrini acquired citizenship. Never had the cosmopolitan character of the Urbs been so distinctly marked. The Roman proper was submerged on every social plane, not only by the influx of Italian immigrants but by the multitude of provincials bringing with them froom every corner of the universe their speech, their manners, their customs, and their superstitions.
Juvenal inveighs against this mud-laden torrent pouring from the Orontes into the Tiber. But the Syrians, whom he so greatly despised, hastened at the first possible moment to assume the guise of Roman civilians; even those who most loudly advertised their xenophobia were themselves more or less newcomvers to Rome, seeking to defend their adopted home againts fresh incursions. Juvenal himself was probaly born at Aquinum. In his house in "Pear Street" on the Quirinal, Martial sighs for Bilbilis, his little home in Aragon. Pliny the Younger, whether at Rome or in his Laurentine villa or on his estates in Tuscany, remains faithful to his Cisalpine birthplace; distant Como, which his liberality embellished, was never absent from his heart.
In the Senate House senators from Gaul, from Spain, from Africa, from Asia, sat side by sude; the Roman emperors, Roman citizens but newly naturalized, came from towns or villages beyond the mountains and the seas. Trajan and Hadrian were born in Spanish Italica in Baetica. Their successir, Antoninus Pius, sprang from bourgeois stock in Nemausus (modern Nimes) in Gallia Narbonensis; and the end of the second century was to see the empire divided between Caesar Clodius Albinus of Hadrumetum (Tunis) and Septimius Severus of Leptis Magna (Tripoli). The biography of Septimius Severus records that even after he had ascended the throne he never succeeded in ridding his speech of the Semitic accent which he had inherited from his Punic ancestors. Thus Rome of the Antonines was a meeting place where Romans of Rome encountered those inferior peoples against whom their laws seemed to have erected solid ethnic barriers, or---to be more accurate--- Rome was a melting pot in which, despite her laws, the perople were continually being subjected to new processes of assimilation. It was, if you will, a Babel, but a Babel where, for better or for worse, all comers learned to speak and think in Latin.
2: Slavery and Manumission
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