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The client of the Empire was a degraded being; of the client in the last age of the Republic we only know that he existed, and could be useful to his patronus in many ways, in elections and trials especially; but we do not hear of his pressing himself on the attention of his patron every morning, or receiving any "sportula."
And then a Gothic school-house rose at the churchyard end, and troops of children poured in and out, and women came daily for alms; and when the frosts came on, every morning I saw a crowd, and soup carried away in pitchers, and clothes and blankets given away; the giving seemed endless, boundless; and I thought of the times of the Roman Empire and the "sportula," when the poor had got to live upon the alms of the rich, more and more, year by year till they devoured their own devourers, and the end came; and I shuddered.
Their two wants were bread and the shows of the circus; so long as the sportula of their patron, the occasional donative of an emperor, and the ambition of political candidates supplied these wants, they lived in contented abasement, anxious neither for liberty nor for power. Sat. iii. 62. Scipio, on being interrupted by the mob in the Forum, exclaimed, "Silence, ye stepsons of Italy!
He gave exhibitions of gladiators in several places, and of various kinds; one yearly on the anniversary of his accession in the pretorian camp , but without any hunting, or the usual apparatus; another in the Septa as usual; and in the same place, another out of the common way, and of a few days' continuance only, which he called Sportula; because when he was going to present it, he informed the people by proclamation, "that he invited them to a late supper, got up in haste, and without ceremony."
The Abecedarium, although it gives the Latin equivalents, may be looked upon to some extent as an English dictionary, for many of the words have an English explanation, as well as a Latin rendering; thus Almesse, or gift of dryncke, meate, or money, distributed to the poore, sporta, sportula; Amyable, pleasante, or hauing a good grace, amabilis; Anabaptistes, a sorte of heretyques of late tyme in Germanye about the yere of our Lorde God 1524.... Anabaptistæ.
Slaves of every age and nation Germans, Egyptians, Gauls, Goths, Syrians, Britons, Moors, pampered and consequential freedmen, impudent confidential servants, greedy buffoons, who lived by making bad jokes at other people's tables; Dacian gladiators, with whom fighting was a trade; philosophers, whose chief claim to reputation was the length of their beards; supple Greeklings of the Tartuffe species, ready to flatter and lie with consummate skill, and spreading their vile character like a pollution wherever they went: and among all these a number of poor but honest clients, forced quietly to put up with a thousand forms of contumely and insult, and living in discontented idleness on the sportula or daily largesse which was administered by the grudging liberality of their haughty patrons.
He abolished the Sportula , and revived the old practice of regular suppers. To the four former parties in the Circensian games, he added two new, who were gold and scarlet. He prohibited the players from acting in the theatre, but permitted them the practice of their art in private houses.
Let him slip into his grave at least as painlessly as you can. And so you must use these charitable societies, remembering all along what a fearful and humbling sign the necessity for them is of the diseased state of this England, as the sportula and universal almsgiving was of the decadence of Rome.
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