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Chapter 1
Pax Romana or Roman Beast?
The Roman Empire was one of the greatest achievements of human civilization. Through its brilliant organization and pragmatic approach to everyday problems, Rome offered its citizens a level of peace and prosperity superior to any the ancient world had ever known. But the benefits had a price tag. In the animal kingdom, the most powerful beast rules. In the human kingdom, as the biblical book of Revelation declares, the most powerful beast is an international totalitarian political power. That power rules a diverse but pacified population, and offers them no place to hide. Such was the power of the beast that was Rome.
I. The Coming of Peace and the Birth of the Beast
On September 11, 2001, I watched on live television as a fully-loaded jetliner exploded with hellish ferocity into the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. Such a catastrophe will forever mark the generations that witnessed it. Reality is stranger than fiction; the daily news more bizarre than a Hollywood script. From a primitive cave on the other side of the world, a wild-eyed Muslim fanatic choreographed the execution of two thousand souls in the bustling business district of sophisticated Lower Manhattan. Afghanistan was front page for months, while we learned of the bombing of faraway places like Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar. The world suddenly got smaller.
But that world had become smaller a long time ago. Kandahar is a form of the name "Alexander." In the 4th century BC, the twenty-five year old Alexander the Great, perhaps the original Western hippie to take the road East to Katmandou in search of a spiritual holy grail, founded this town in Afghanistan and gave it his name. What was a Western Greek doing so far from home? He was setting up what would become the Greco-Roman Empire, which stretched from Western Macedonia to Hindu India.
A. Alexander's Ragged Band
The Roman Beast seemed tame enough when it was defined as Alexander's dream of taking Western culture to the whole world. In just eleven years, this brilliant young soldier/statesman defeated the entire Persian Empire and marched his men East as far as India. Disappointed to discover that this was not the end of the world, he determined to slog on, but his exhausted, ragged men would go no farther. But Alexander had already spread his Greek, Hellenistic Western culture throughout the known world, an achievement hailed as one of the great events of human history. Historians contend that his "appearance forms a turning point in the history of the race," an event greater than the Renaissance or the Reformation. He is believed to be
The inaugurator of that comprehensive cosmopolitanism...(a unified world)...that reached its apogee in the Roman Empire...his [great] aim was to accomplish 'the marriage of the East and the West.'
This view of modern scholarship mirrors that of ancient writers who make a similar claim about Alexander:
Considering himself appointed by God as a universal ruler and reconciler,...he brought together everything from every quarter...He commanded all to regard the world as their fatherland.
A modern scholar says of the final product, Rome, that it was "the heart of the world's first and only unified global civilization." This massive pagan Empire spanned the East and the West over a period of six centuries, from 333 BC, to the Christian baptism of Constantine in AD 312. It is here that we locate the birth of Rome.
It is not my intention in the pages that follow to give an exhaustive description of Roman life and culture, which would include the glorious and the inglorious, the beautiful and the ugly, or what theologians call "common grace" and "common curse." My goal is to highlight the features of the Roman Empire that brought about global peace, and to explain why Rome can at the same time be called a "beast." To this end, I will describe first the international and generally pacified character of the Empire, with its economic successes and its elements of police control. Chapter 2 will attempt to show the place of religion within that political structure.
II. The Roman Empire: Global and Pacified
When Rome defeated the last royal descendent of Alexander in 176 BC, she inherited and immediately assumed the full extent and the many achievements of the Greek Empire. In the 4th century BC, Alexander had destroyed the long-standing political organization of fiercely independent Greek city states and had set up imperial, central control. Under Alexander's rule emerged "a new sense of the inhabited world, as the international stage for human action."
The pragmatic Romans increased the efficiency of the system they inherited. Rome became the center of the world and an ethnic melting pot. At the time of the New Testament its population had grown to about a million and a half people, a megalopolis the likes of which the ancient world had never seen. People flocked to Rome, the unique city- the only city in the world-a definition Italians still seem to favor! "The two main poles of the Romans' mental universe were the city and the world." The Pope begins his annual Easter message with the phrase ad urbi et orbi-"to the City and the World." It is the old Roman imperial, "Romanocentric" way of describing the globe. For the ancient Romans, "everything that happened began in Rome and to Rome everything returned." Rome was the center of the universe. If you have never been to Rome, try to go. From la cittá eterna, the eternal city, the representatives of power, governors, magistrates and tax-collectors would leave, to levy taxes and to enforce the Pax Romana throughout the Empire.
Rome owed to Alexander the homogeneity of its enormous empire. Through him Greek culture, and especially the Greek language, spread from Greece to India, bringing to East and West a unity that "has never been achieved since." Some ancient languages and cultures, like the Phoenician, disappeared for good once Greek ways were adopted. People dressed like Greeks, undressed and exercised like Greeks (in the gymnasia), philosophized like Greeks, wrote like Greeks, taught like Greeks, built buildings like the Greeks, and tried to sound like Greeks. It was cool to be Greek and Western. This was the beginning of the first westernized world culture, a unity that Rome completed and exploited for purposes of empire. Romans were happy to speak Greek well into the 1st century AD. Only later did Latin take over.
My sons love Monty Python and sometimes spend a fun evening reciting sections of dialogue from some of the less bawdy skits. Much to our delight, they get all the right accents and intonations. They keep the family in stitches reproducing the hilarious debate between members of the Judean Popular People's Front, a radical protest group trying to drum up hatred of the Romans. Revolutionary #1 asks: "What have the Romans done for us?" Revolutionary #2, a realist, answers, quite reasonably, "sanitation." Revolutionary #1, "All right, but apart from that, what have the Romans done for us?" Revolutionary #2 replies, "Education." The debate continues as the realist lists all the advantages brought by the Romans-public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, public health. Revolutionary #1 replies in frustration: "But apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" To finish off the scene, Revolutionary #2 replies, "Peace!"
III. Roman Utopia: Bread and Circuses
Roman citizens doubtless realized that Rome's power and ingenuity had provided an ease of life unequaled in the history of the world. One historian notes that after the triumph of Rome over the Hellenistic empire:
The whole world was weary of war....Hence the rise of the empire was universally hailed as the dawn of a better era. The Pax Romana...called forth a chorus of profound thanksgiving....Emperors were hailed as Saviors, sons of the Divine, Protectors of the human race.
These saviors took care of their own. The Roman satirical writer, Juvenal, in around AD 100 coined the famous phrase panem et circences-"bread and circuses," to indicate how the Roman State looked after (and controlled) the population through material plenty and endless entertainment. Such economic plenty and social peace must have caused many to believe that life could not be much better.
1. Bread
There was an abundance of bread. Alexander's colonization of the ancient world produced the first international mass market, based on the ease of travel and transport afforded by the Mediterranean Sea. For the first time, the West gained economic supremacy over the East and a period of unparalleled, sustained prosperity prevailed. Newly minted coins standardized the monetary system and Western technology eliminated frontiers, so that goods flowed freely. In particular, the granaries of Egypt exported their goods all over the world. Boats loaded with grain left the Egyptian port of Alexandria on the hour to feed the voracious appetite of Roman consumption. There was no problem with the bread side of Juvenal's equation. After the defeat of the last king of Macedonia in 167 BC, Romans never again paid taxes. Can you imagine-no IRS? Moreover constant military conquests meant that unfamiliar and exotic Eastern delicacies from India and Persia now flowed into Rome, with untold abundance. The waterways were not the only means of transport. Rome built fifty thousand miles of paved roads to facilitate cultural exchange and political control.
At the time of the formation of the New Testament, Rome attained its highest level of material riches. Conspicuous consumption marked the life of the emperor. Even Nero's fishing nets were made of gold, threaded with meshes of purple and crimson silk. He paid four million sesterces (dollars) for embroidered Babylonian sofa coverlets. His wife, Poppaea, not content with bathing in asses' milk, had her mules decked out in golden shoes, and Caligula kept his favorite horse in a stable made of exquisite marble. It was the horse he planned to make a senator! Approximately 20,000 slaves were in attendance at the imperial palace to take care of his lordship's every whim. The emperor had as many categories of slaves to arrange and tend his wardrobe as he had separate types of clothes. They had plenty of work, since Nero never wore the same robe twice. Private individuals were only slightly less opulent. Wealthy Roman families often owned up to a 1000 slaves. Toward the end of the 1st century AD a successful ex-slave, one C. Caelius Isidorus, owned no less than 4116 slaves!
2. Circuses-Rome: A Sports Fan's Dream Come True
Discretionary income was lavished on mass entertainment to a degree never seen in the history of the world, and unparalleled until modern times. The emperor, known as the princeps (the first citizen), was the number one sports fan. He was also the primary channel surfer-old world style-as well as the number one customer. His lordship's day provided endless pleasures in a personalized home-entertainment center that would put its modern-day multi-channeled, wrap-around stereophonic equivalent to shame. For his majesty's viewing pleasure, an NBA-sized athletic arena stood right next to the imperial palace. Behind and below the palace, which sat on a high bluff, was the Circus Maximus, a stadium three or four times the size of an NFL ball park that could seat anywhere from 250,000 to 380,000. From the palace balcony, a fully-equipped 1st century sky-box, the emperor could watch, from morning till night, chariot races, more violent and intense than any Monday Night Football game, complete with iubilatores, "cheerleaders," whose duty it was to encourage their racing teams to maximum effort by victory chants.
a) Life the Movie
Just as they loved the great spectacles, the Romans loved their bodies. They kept them clean, perfumed, sun-tanned, and in excellent physical condition, because everyone pictured himself on stage. Image was everything. To the left of the Circus Maximus were acres of gymnasia and baths, that served as an enormous twenty-four-hour imperial fitness center, and that were a part of the daily life of every able-bodied Roman. It was none other than Juvenal, the Roman author of the 1st century, who came up with the famous phrase: "a healthy mind in a healthy body." The Romans wanted good bodies to play the part:
One's body could not lie: the image communicated to others was an expression of one's character. Roman culture was without inwardness: a Roman's awareness of himself came from the way others perceived him. His virtues and vices were an open book: they were printed in his movements, style of dress, voice. The Romans were forever on stage but they played themselves. They used their hands, face and gestures as well as words to express themselves. Everything was loudly expressive: even sobriety could be outspoken and flashy. Gravitas, the senatorial virtue par excellence, meant a careful step, a close-fitting toga, a ponderous delivery, few gestures.
I cannot help thinking of the title of a recent best-seller, Life: The Movie.
b) It's Only a Game
The emperor had other channels to watch. A three-minute chariot ride away from the imperial palace stood the Coliseum, a structure only slightly smaller than the Los Angeles version, built towards the end of the 1st century AD, in which his majesty could assuage his thirst for blood, animal or human, throughout the long, hot Roman afternoons. Being there was, doubtless, "twice the fun," for virtually every contest went to the death. It was "fun" for the spectators. For the participants, the next fight could be the last, so it was in their interests to be good. Apparently only two gladiators in a school of 20,000 were able to train themselves never to blink under any conditions, thereby making themselves invincible, since "they neither missed any of their opponents' moves nor gave anything away themselves." Such intensity of self-control for self-preservation is difficult to imagine. The tension of making a four-foot putt worth a million dollars-without blinking-pales in comparison. What if missing the putt condemned you to death by clubbing with a nine-iron? Such intensity was even draining for the spectators. So in the evening the magnificent dining hall of "Caesar's Palace" doubled as both a five-star restaurant and a relaxing nightclub floor show, worthy of any Las Vegas extravaganza.
In Rome's early history, from around 200 BC, there were seven days per year devoted to "games" (ludi, from which we get "ludicrous," which means frivolous). At the time of the emperor Claudius (10 BC-AD 54) the Roman calendar contained 159 days celebrated as holidays, of which 93 were devoted to games given at public expense, and this list does not include many non-state sponsored ceremonies. The emperors added official game days the way we add TV channels. For a sports fan, that's progress! With the obsession for sports came an obsession for gambling, the proceeds from which the state used for its own ends.
IV. The Mark of the Beast-Totalitarian Control
Material success and leisure came at a price. From one perspective, Rome was a fabulous social achievement. From another, it was a terrifying success in social manipulation. This geographically vast and ethnically cosmopolitan empire was held together by overt and subtle techniques of control. Material plenty, often ill-gotten and ill-used, bred complacency. People demanded more and more festive wealth until Rome choked on its own affluence. A contemporary of Jesus, the Roman historian, Livy (59 BC-AD 17), left this telling indictment:
Of late, wealth has made us greedy, and excessive pleasures produce a general desire to carry wantonness and licence to the point of personal ruin and universal destruction.
Though state welfare and material excess produced inevitable social decadence, they also worked wonders as an unintended form of State control. Some were not fooled, as Juvenal's "bread and circuses" remark indicates. The general populace was not bothered, as long as food and entertainment abounded. The emperors, eager to maintain power, were happy to oblige. A historian of the period remarks:
Even in lean years, when treasury shortages compelled them to ration their expenditure, [the rulers] exhausted their ingenuity to provide the public with more festivals than any people, in any country, at any time, has ever seen.
A contemporary said of the emperor Trajan at the end of the 1st century that his
wisdom never failed to pay attention to the stars of the theatre, the circus, or the arena, for he well knew that the excellence of a government is shown no less in its care for the amusements of the people than in serious matters, and that although the distribution of corn and money may satisfy the individual, spectacles are necessary for the contentment of the masses.
Perhaps no culture except our own has been so dominated by entertainment. Back then the emperors consciously used it for social control.
A. Crumbling Intermediary Social Structures
A balanced society includes intermediary structures that tend to limit state power. In the Empire, those structures included the family and marriage. Critics of patriarchy in any form will often turn to the Roman family as the classical expression of patriarchal authority. The Roman patriarch was an all powerful father in a hierarchical structure. The Roman family was no idyllic institution, and the Roman pater was far from angelic. For various reasons "...the Romans proclaimed to anyone prepared to listen that there was nothing worse than marriage, and that were it not for the necessity of producing children, no one would ever get married." Married couples avoided meeting one another in private for privacy was a constant source of friction. All this valid criticism notwithstanding, the Roman family constituted a structure of stability for all involved, husbands, wives and children alike. During the 1st century AD, the Roman family, this "unassailable rock" had cracked and crumbled away on every side.
1. Early Feminism
During this same period the role of the woman began to change. No longer content to be housewives, some Roman women chose emancipation from the duties of maternity and engaged in "male" pursuits like law, politics, public debate, dressing like a man, hunting with men (spear in hand), gladiatorial jousting in full armor, fencing, wrestling in the nude, and other feats of strength and physical prowess. Historian Carcopino speaks of "emancipated"...wives, who were the various product of the new conditions of Roman marriage. Some evaded the duties of maternity for fear of losing their good looks; some took a pride in being behind their husbands in no sphere of activity, and vied with them in tests of strength which their sex would have seemed to forbid; some were not content to live their lives by their husband's side, but carried on another life without him at the price of betrayals and surrenders for which they did not even trouble to blush.
2. Redefinition of the Family
With emancipation came the loosening of family ties. At the beginning of the 2nd century AD, the family name was no longer exclusively defined by male descent. Now the line could be traced through the female and through illegitimate relationships. By the 2nd century the father's absolute authority over his children and wife, the so-called Patria Potestas had "completely disappeared." Fathers gave up their rights to arrange marriages for their children, thus revolutionizing both marriage and the family-for good and ill.
In this "liberated culture," personal "choice" prevailed, adultery became endemic, and divorce spread unchecked. Men divorced their wives with impunity, and women their husbands. Juvenal illustrates the situation with biting humor:
Thus does she lord it over her husband. But before long she vacates her kingdom; she flits from one home to another wearing out her bridal veil. . . . Thus does the tale of her husbands grow; there will be eight of them in the course of five autumns-a fact worthy of commemoration on her tomb.
Another Roman writer of the period, Martial (AD 38-101), comments about a woman marrying her tenth husband: "I am less offended by a more straightforward prostitute." Says the historian Carcopino, "Divorces were so common that-as we learn from the jurists of the time-a series of them not infrequently led to the fair lady and her dowry returning, after many intermediate stages, to her original bridal bed."
3. Alternate Sexuality
Outside the limiting sphere of heterosexual marriage, already disfigured, other more or less accepted forms of sexual activity called for Roman attention. Bi-sexuality was common among the elite. According to Suetonius, the Roman historian and biographer, the Roman Emperor Caligula (AD 12-41), believing himself to be God once said: "...for me anything is licit." He put his religion into practice by living in habitual incest with his sisters, and at the same time having homosexual relations with a number of courtiers. In addition, according to the historian Florence Dupont, paedophilia was a constant and accepted expression of Roman sexual appetite. As in ancient Greece, "Roman boys were pursued relentlessly by adult men...Sooner or later, in fact, every Roman was accused of being effeminate." Dupont goes on to state: "If children were constantly molested, it was because Roman adults found that the deepest-rooted passion and the one that was hardest to overcome was sexual desire for very young boys and girls."
4. Drop of the Birth Rate
This liberation movement of the 1st century inevitably affected the birth rate at the beginning of the 2nd century, and beyond. According to the historian Will Durant, the fall of Rome was in great part attributable to the Roman refusal to bear and raise children. A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian (emperor AD 117-138): ".... A law of Septimus Severus speaks of a penuria hominum-a shortage of men." In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had been halved in his time (AD 250). He mourned to see "the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away." Only the barbarians and Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within." Durant points to the widespread practice of infanticide, abortion, sexual excesses, and the avoidance or deferment of marriage as the likely causes in this plunging population.
With the weakening of these intermediary structures of family and marriage, the socially destabilizing effects of alternate sexual practices, and the depressing, relentless drop in the birth rate, the liberated individual stood face to face and often alone before the enormous power of the police state. What looked like utopia on earth from one perspective, seemed dark and foreboding from another.
B. Police Control
Discipline was absolutely necessary in an empire of police control. Such discipline was evident in the sporting performances of gladiators and charioteers, but these spectacles were merely one facet of dazzling Roman pomp-as any fan of Hollywoodian imperial epics knows. Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, Spartacus and the Robe give some idea of the impressive pageantry Rome produced so professionally for the admiring throngs. Though American high school grad nights may be getting close, no one did victory processions or "triumphs" better than the Romans. In memory of the defeat of the Palestinian insurrection and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in the Jewish War of AD 68-70, the emperor Titus later built at one end of the Forum (the ancient Roman civic center) a massive stone arch, like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Upon returning to Rome, he, his troops, his brother Domitian (another future emperor and ruthless persecutor of Christians), and his father, the newly appointed emperor Vespasian, processed in their many-colored military splendor, as thousands of spectators, lining the main street, roared in approval. Behind the conquerors were dragged in chains the benighted Israelite prisoners of war. At the lower end of the Forum, in front of the great temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, the procession concluded with an elaborate religious ceremony in praise of imperial divine power. As the crowd cheered some of the notable prisoners were killed on the spot. The rest were led to the adjacent Mamartine prison where they too were butchered to the glory of the eternal Roman Reich.
The message of the Roman triumph was unmistakable to foreign enemies and citizens alike-do not mess with Rome. The unbending discipline found among the gladiators was also to be found in the common soldier, and its rigor turned the Roman army into an invincible killing machine. For the Roman soldier, surrender was unthinkable, defeat an unacceptable outcome. "Rome had a way of waging war that was incomprehensible to other nations and which transformed its soldiers into conquerors; it no longer played traditional war games." To this as well, Alexander made a small contribution, by introducing to the West the Eastern practice of crucifixion. With this and other gruesome control techniques, an implacably cruel military dictatorship ruled the earth (orbis) but also the city (urbis).
C. Give Peace a Chance
The famous pax Romana (generally tranquil conditions made possible by efficient administration and unequalled authority) was clearly a military and political peace, producing an unusually fruitful period of economic "good times." But some paid for peace with their lives. Roman power could put down dissent in the name of civic order whenever it desired. One example must suffice. In AD 61 a slave murdered his master, Lucius Pedanius Secundus, either because master Lucius had failed to give the slave his promised freedom or because he had seduced the slave's male lover. The law required the execution not only of the murderer, but of every slave living under Lucius's roof (400 men, women, and children). In spite of great opposition from the crowds, and some hesitation even on Nero's part, the four hundred were burned alive. The social order had to be preserved.
Cicero, the famous Roman orator, born in 106 BC, reminded an exiled political opponent of the Empire: "Remember that [wherever you go] you are equally within the power of the conqueror." For its time, Rome was an overwhelming "global village." For dissidents, there was no place to run. In the 18th century, Edward Gibbon wrote a two-thousand-page history of the decline and fall of Rome, long before the modern reality of our planetary village. However, he caught something of the "globalist" character of Roman power. Comparing his own time of separate nation-states, and the freedom to change one's ruler for another in order to escape a local tyrant, Gibbon sees the Roman Empire as fearfully totalitarian. "The empire of the Romans filled the world...[which] became a safe and dreary prison for [Caesar's] enemies....To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly." "Safe and dreary" is one form of peace, I suppose.
The Roman peace was assured by bread and circuses and the iron hand of the police state. Rome promised a lot to its citizens and delivered a lot, but it ultimately collapsed from moral failure. A population fed and entertained to the maximum and kept in check by the exercise of ruthless and often arbitrary physical power was sufficiently docile to see the cruelty of Rome as normal and necessary. That Rome enjoyed watching undesirable human beings ripped apart by wild beasts makes the "beast" an appropriate symbol for what she became before her collapse.
Surprisingly, it was often harmless Christians who served as victims. One was Blandina, a frail young servant girl from a Christian community in Lyons. She was arrested during the persecutions of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-180), the Stoic moral philosopher and white-haired gentle emperor of Gladiator fame. Not benefiting from the good emperor's general theories of the grandeur and order of the universe and the providence of the gods, this young lady was tortured from morning till night, with techniques that would have killed more sturdy souls. Indeed, eye-witnesses say she got stronger, buoyed up by the thought she constantly repeated: "I am a Christian woman and nothing wicked happens to us." Eusebius, the Church historian says "she had put on the great and invincible athlete, Christ." Sometime later she was put in the arena for the viewing pleasure of the blood-thirsty crowd. Here is how the witnesses described the event:
After scourging, after the beasts, after the gridiron (a heated iron chair), she was put into a net and thrown to a bull. She was tossed about a long time by the beast...and the pagans themselves confessed that never before among them had a woman suffered so much and so long.
The long-suffering Blandina went to her well-earned heavenly reward. I plan to meet her one day. But this hideous spectacle in the arena is pregnant with larger significance. The Christian virgin ends up in the fangs of the pagan Beast not by accident or simply to fill a vacant spot in the afternoon program. She is devoured by the Beast at the urging of the Harlot.
Rome's intention was to control not just the body but also the soul-for the good of the world utopia.