Under the Spear: An Eviction Auction in Ancient Rome

Marcus Valerius

Look at the wall beside the baker's, friend. Whitewash, fresh last week, and across it a painted notice in red letters. Auction of the goods of Decimus the lamp maker, third hour, in the little portico at the end of our street. That placard has been up three days, and every morning a crier has walked the neighborhood shouting the same thing, so nobody in my insula can claim surprise. Least of all Decimus. He lives two floors below me.

Marcus Valerius

I smell the morning before I see it. Bread from the oven, mule dung, wet stone, and the sweat of a crowd gathering early because a neighbor's trouble is the best free show in Rome. Children run between the legs of the grown men. A pack mule brays somewhere in the alley. And there in the portico, planted upright between two paving stones, stands a spear.

Marcus Valerius

That's the hasta. Every Roman knows what it means, even the ones who couldn't tell you why. We say a man sells sub hasta, under the spear, and they say the custom grows out of the old days, when a general sold the plunder of a conquered town right there on the field. So the spear says one thing: what happens here is a lawful sale under Roman law. Whoever wins the bidding owns the thing outright, as a Roman should. It's a little grim, if you think about it. War booty, and now a lamp maker's blankets.

Marcus Valerius

Because that's what is laid out on the stones. Decimus fell behind on his rent, the landlord's man came, and the household came down the stairs and into the street. A three legged table with one leg newly mended. A cupboard with a cracked door. A traveling chest. Four wine jars, chipped at the lip, two Spanish and two Gallic by the clay. A winter blanket, greasy at the edges. A bed frame. And a bundle of poetry rolls, which Decimus's brother wrote and nobody ever read. I know that list, you see. Juvenal, our satirist, mocks the poets who ended up selling exactly this sort of junk from the auctioneer's stand. Wine jars, tripods, cupboards, chests, and a bad tragedy on top.

Marcus Valerius

And there he is, the man who makes it all move. The praeco. Hilarus is his name, a broad man with a voice like a cart rolling over cobbles, and he has not even begun yet.

Marcus Valerius

Now, I want you to understand something about Hilarus, because it's the great joke of this city. By law, a man like him is a shameful sort of person. Our statutes bar criers from sitting on the councils of the towns, as a rule, and the better families look down on anyone who sells his voice for coin. Senators wrinkle their noses. A crier's father was probably a slave, and Hilarus knows it, and he doesn't care.

Marcus Valerius

Because he is rich. Ask anyone. Our poet Martial tells a joke about an old father with a daughter to marry. Suitors line up: two praetors, four tribunes, seven advocates, ten poets. And he sends them all away and gives the girl to Eulogus the auctioneer. Martial also advises one father that if his boy is dull, make him a crier or a builder. A joke, yes. But Romans laugh at the things that are true.

Marcus Valerius

Hilarus strikes the spear shaft with his palm, once, and the crowd falls quiet, because that voice reaches the back of the portico and over the baker's shouting and into the next street. He holds up the cupboard. "A cupboard, citizens! Solid oak! It has held the secrets of Decimus for twelve years, and not one of them was interesting!" The crowd laughs. Decimus is standing at the edge of it in his good tunic, and he laughs too, with his mouth only.

Marcus Valerius

This is the part that fascinates me, even though I've seen it a hundred times. Hilarus doesn't wait for numbers to be called. Some men shout them, yes. A man in a patched tunic, one of the dealers in secondhand scraps, bellows his bid. But the real buyers barely move. A lifted thumb. A tilt of the chin. An eyebrow. And Hilarus catches every one, across forty faces, never losing his patter. Then he cries it out as if the whole street had shouted it. When the bidding stops, he says the word, addico, it's yours, and a buyer's name goes to the man beside him.

Marcus Valerius

That man is the quiet one at the little folding table. Philon, the coactor. Look at him, because he is the real engine here. He has wax tablets and a bronze stylus, and every lot, every winner, every sum goes into his ledger. No one hands over a bag of coins on the spot. Philon pays Decimus's creditors for the sale, keeping a small cut for himself, and the buyers owe him, sometimes for months. And what he writes is law. If a man says he never bought that table, the ledger says otherwise, and a judge will believe the wax.

Marcus Valerius

The bed frame goes for less than I expected. The poetry rolls draw a laugh and a single bid from a man who wants the papyrus. The blanket goes to a woman who sniffs it twice and still takes it. And then Hilarus lifts a small bronze lamp, worn smooth, a lamp Decimus made himself, the first one he ever sold well. The crowd does not laugh at that. Hilarus, to his credit, lowers his voice and says only, "A lamp."

Marcus Valerius

I raise my thumb. I'm not a rich man. I sell wine, I live four floors up, and the baths cost me coppers I count carefully. But I raise my thumb. A man in the second row raises his eyebrow, I raise my thumb again, and Hilarus catches it, grinning, and drives the price a little higher before he stops. Addico. Marcus Valerius. Philon writes it down without looking up.

Marcus Valerius

I will owe him for it through the summer. Afterward, when the spear has been pulled from the stones and the crowd has gone off with its tables and jars, I find Decimus sitting on the edge of the portico and put the lamp in his hands. He turns it over, says nothing, and then he says it's good bronze, that he always did use good bronze. That's Rome, friend. A neighbor's whole life, picked through in an hour, in dust and sweat and noise. And by noon the street smells of bread again, and the shouting starts for the next sale.