In Rome there was a steady growth in population, which by the end of the period had probably reached one million -- the figure for London in 1800, New York in 1860. A big total for a city by any standards, for those of the ancient world it was prodigious. To feed, clothe, house, amuse -- and bury -- so large a population called for many big undertakings. The supply of grain to the capital from overseas, though not perfected until the early Empire, was probably the most complex operation continuously maintained until modern times. New aqueducts were built to meet the growing need for water, for both use and ornament: Rome became a city of fountains, as it is today. The public markets were enlarged, and there was supervision of weights and measures. Street traffic was regulated, and heavy delivery wagons were allowed into the city only at night. For housing, a cheap type of building was evolved, six to ten stories high, let off in apartments. Since they often stood on island sites, such houses were called insulae. Many of them were badly built and maintained by landlords interested only in quick profits. Such tenements were the usual dwellings of the Roman poor. The poorer quarters of the city, and notably the Subura, just off the Forum Romanum, had become squalid slums. Even in the better quarters, there was a lack of many of the services that would be thought indispensable in a modern city. There was no street lighting, no public transport, and, as yet, no proper police force.

Nor was the public architecture of the city worthy of Rome's position as a world capital. From the aediles, who held office for a year only, no great schemes of town planning could be expected. Some improvements, it is true, were made during this period. Sulla, as dictator, restored many temples and built the Tabularium, or record office, whose plain and noble façade still rises above the west end of the Forum. In 62-60 B.C. the temple of Aesculapius on the Tiber Island was repaired and adorned with frescoes, and the platform of the temple modeled into the shape of a ship, while two new bridges were built to the island itself. From his eastern spoils, Pompey carried out a really notable project of urban development, which included the first stone theater in Rome, modeled on the Greek theater at Mytilene and seating twenty-five thousand people, a temple of Venus Victrix, and a great colonnaded square enclosing a garden, the first public amenity of its kind in Rome. In the Curia of Pompey, part of this group of buildings, Caesar met his death.

The dictatorship of Julius Caesar offered conditions under which architecture thrives. We hear of the commission of a Greek architect and approval of a master plan to regulate future development. The Tiber was to be channeled and straightened, leaving the Campus Martius free for building purposes, with its sports activities transferred to the Campi Vaticani on the other bank. A great new basilica was constructed in the Forum, and more space for public business was to be provided by a new Forum, to be built around a temple of Venus Genetrix in discharge of a vow made at the battle of Pharsalus. Caesar did not live to complete these schemes. Had his life been longer, there is no doubt that he, not his successor, would have carried out the great transformation which "found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble."

But although, for much of the period, Rome kept its oldfashioned look, the racial make-up of its population was radically transformed. For a century there had been largescale immigration to the city, from Italy and from all parts of the Mediterranean. By the end of the Republic, Rome had become a cosmopolitan city, as it was to remain under the Empire. Many of the new inhabitants were slaves -- Asiatics, Greeks, and Syrians after the Mithridatic wars, Celts and Germans from the wars of Marius and Caesar. It is hard to estimate the number of slaves in Rome at this time, but perhaps they formed between a fifth and a third of the total population, employed in a wide range of domestic, business, and industrial occupations, and especially on the labor force of public contractors. Their condition, though hard, was not hopeless. They were allowed to accumulate money, to own property, and to buy their freedom by the process of manumission, which was widely practiced. As freedmen, liberti, they would become shopkeepers, artisans, or petty clerks, though some found openings as builders, teachers, and doctors, and a few made large fortunes (like the baker Eurysaces, whose costly and vulgar tomb stiff stands by the Porta Maggiore). The libertus was subject to some legal restrictions, but his children became full citizens (the poet Horace was such a one). This constant reinforcement of the citizen body by non-Roman and non-Italian elements was a very important factor in the social life of Rome.

Slaves and freedmen apart, trade with the provinces caused the growth of sizable foreign communities in Rome, notably from Asia, Syria, Egypt, and, by the end of the period, Spain. It is often said that the competition of slave labor deprived the free urban poor of work, but the truth seems to be that it depressed wages rather than produced unemployment. So long as most manufacturing trades were carried on by a system of small owners, selling products made on the premises by a few workmen, there would be plenty of employment, though profits would be small. There were no doubt guilds for each trade, as at Pompeii and other Italian towns, though there is little evidence for Rome itself.

Greek philosophy continued to expand the influence it had won in the days of Scipio. Young Romans followed their studies, at the university stage, in the intellectual centers of the Greek world. Many studying at Athens were swept into the armies of Brutus. But, increasingly, Rome itself was a magnet which attracted Greek savants in search of lucrative fees and a wider reputation. Philo of Larissa, founder of the New Academy, taught there after 88 B.C. Antiochus of Ascalon, afterward head of the Academy in Athens, and Posidonius, the greatest thinker of the age, visited Rome to lecture. Philodemus of Gadara came in 75 B.C. and settled down to teach Epicureanism at Herculaneum, in a magnificent villa presented to him by the wealthy family of the Pisones. Another Epicurean, Siron, taught there and at Naples; to him went the young Virgil, anxious to free his mind from care, and ready to bid the Muses farewell. Fortunately for the world, he returned.

It was not an age of original thought. The great systems of Plato and Aristotle were still expounded by the schools they had founded, the Academy and the Peripatetics. The Epicureans remained faithful to the words of their master and hostile to all other schools. But the prevailing interest in ethics was drawing the other schools closer together; Antiochus. taught that there was little difference between the Academic, Peripatetic, and Stoic systems. The dominant influence at Rome was Stoicism, with its doctrine of a beneficent providence, the law of nature, and the possibility of progress toward virtue even for the layman. But this was Stoicism as modified by Panaetius; a few Romans preferred the earlier austerity and rigidity of Zeno ( 335-263 B.C.). Its influence ran be seen in such men as Marcus Favonius, who dared to rebuke Octavian after Philippi, and above all, in Brutus and Cato the Younger. Their deaths in the Civil War began the association between Stoicism and extreme republicanism which was to be such a feature of the Empire.

Posidonius is the one great name of the age, the last firstrate mind among the Greek philosophers. Born at Apamea on the Orontes, about 130 B.C., he worked for many years with Panaetius, and then set up his own school at Rhodes. His reputation attracted many Romans, among them Cicero and Pompey. Although his works survive only in fragments, there can be no doubt of their far-reaching influence. At the center of his system lay a belief in the harmony that pervades the cosmos. In man, this is to be seen in the "sympathy" between the stars and our souls, which are also parts of the divine fire, to which they will return after death. In nature, it is seen in the influence of the moon on the tides, a brilliant discovery which Posidonius made from his observations of the Atlantic on the shores of Africa and Spain. He was a great traveler, deeply interested in the barbarian peoples of northern and western Europe. These were the peoples destined to be conquered and civilized by Rome, and Posidonius taught that the universal empire of Rome corresponded to the universal state of all mankind postulated by the law of nature. The Roman statesman who governs this empire with justice and virtue is fulfilling the highest of earthly missions, to be rewarded after death by personal immortality. This is the idea expounded by Cicero in the famous Dream of Scipio. On the scientific side, Posidonius' interests led him to the study of astronomy, geography, and meteorology; he was also interested in mathematics, rhetoric, and history. He wrote a history of Rome from 146 to 70 B.C., as a continuation of Polybius. Few Roman writers of the next two generations escape his influence.

Nor should the importance of Cicero be underestimated. Although he describes his philosophical works as mere compilations (the only activities of his about which he is so modest!) they have had an influence seldom attained by works of popularization. Essentially, they deal with problems of personal and political conduct from the standpoint of a civilized and kindly gentleman. Without profundity, they are informed by a humanity which deeply impressed not only his contemporaries, but all European thought from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. The modern world, which has deserted Cicero as a philosopher, has followed some much worse masters.

But Greek philosophy, as a guide to life, could satisfy only a section of the educated class. Far wider, and in the long run of much greater import, was the appeal to all classes of the mystery cults of Greece and the Orient. We are not so well informed on Roman religion in this period as in that of Augustus and later, but there can be no doubt that the spread of these cults was its chief feature, and the reasons for this are clear. In part, it was due to the large number of Greeks and Orientals in the population of the city, in part to Roman contacts with Asia and Syria, but, above all, to a deep need for religious and spiritual guidance in the terrible times of the later Republic. The Bacchic and Orphic mystery cults had come to Rome from the Greek cities of southern Italy by the beginning of the second century B.C. The attempt of the Senate to put down the orgiastic features of the Bacchic cult in 186 B.C. seems to have had no lasting effects. The Villa of the Mysteries and the Villa Item at Pompeii display famous frescoes of the rites of the Bacchic initiates. These date from the early part of the first century B.C.; Rome itself has nothing comparable before the early Empire. But the symbols of the Bacchic mysteries are frequent in Arretine pottery and on other objets d'art, and the literary references to Bacchus gain in significance when we remember how widespread the cult was. All these mysteries, of Eleusis, Bacchus, or Orpheus, promised initiates a life beyond the grave, with rewards or punishments according to their conduct on earth. Their rich ceremonial and profound symbolism satisfied a need for personal religious experience in a way that the formalism of the state cults could never do. Small wonder that they won so many adherents at this time.