To those who may have to pay again for the new blunders – nevertheless always the same – of the big shots who don’t want to consider the errors of the past.
Pierre Closterman
The historian Polybius, a Greek writing in the second century before Christ, acknowledging the virtues of the democratic Roman Republic conquering his homeland, sought the cause.
The most important superiority the Roman Commonwealth displays, in my opinion, is their religious beliefs, for I think what in other nations is looked upon as a reproach, I mean a scrupulous fear of gods, is the very thing which keeps the Roman commonwealth together. To such a degree is this prevalent among them both in private and public business that nothing could exceed it. Many people think this unaccountable, but in my opinion their object is to use it as a check upon common people. If a state wholly of philosophers were possible, such a custom perhaps would be unnecessary. But since every multitude is fickle and full of lawless desire, unreasoning anger and violent passion, the only resource is to keep them in check by mysterious terrors and scenic effects of this sort. Thus, in my opinion, the ancients were not acting without purpose or at random when they brought among the vulgar those opinions about the gods and punishments in Hades: much rather do I think that men nowadays are acting rashly and foolishly in rejecting them. This is the reason why, apart from anything else, Greek statesmen, if entrusted with a single talent, though protected by ten checking-clerks, as many seals and twice as many witnesses, yet cannot be induced to keep faith, whereas among the Romans, in their magistracies and embassies, men have the handling of a great amount of money and yet from pure respect to their oath keep their faith intact.1
Two centuries later, officials of the Roman Empire had a reputation for brutal greed.
Success, unchecked or balanced, like power, tended to corrupt. Polybius’ contempt for the masses prompted his endorsing Plato’s view in Book Three of the Republic that recommended ‘noble lies’ as a means of ruling.2 To some upper class Romans, religion was the noblest lie of all, essential for social unity in a world coming apart. Archaeology reveals by absence of evidence that, by the third century, virtually no one prayed in private to the imperial cult, the Romanized Greek deities.
Many Romans lived existentially, in anomie, unsure of any guidelines or commitment. Greek philosophy had long since largely demolished belief in the many gods among the educated. Socrates and Plato had pointed the way to monotheism, without suggesting any specific morality or supportive community.
Democritus had attacked belief in the gods without denying providence. To Greeks, an atheist might be either one attacking false ideas about the divine or denying any supernatural. Christians were, rightly, in the first sense regarded as atheists.
Three centuries later, the Roman Lucretius had proposed a much darker cosmology than Democritus, a universe without a moral centre. He derided romantic love and denied that death was an evil. One account has it that he died of the effects of a love potion, others that he committed suicide.3 Fawning praise for his patron, Caius Menius, ‘a thoroughly evil man’ in the opinion of Catullus, a self-proclaimed womanizer, was the price he paid for favours.4
Paganism was struggling to survive through syncreticism, all the gods’ names for the one. Rulers could thus claim tolerance even as they persecuted. The Roman world was filled with spiritual shoppers, wandering from one philosophy or cult to another.
Fortune tellers and interpreters of dreams abounded. With political and social freedom vanished, helpless before natural disasters, feelings of powerlessness encouraged fatalism. Astrology’s popularity grew as personal options withered. No other field demanded such knowledge and skill. The astrologer was astronomer, geometrician and mathematician. Every legion in the army had a birth date, its inauguration, its horoscope cast daily thereafter by priests assigned to the task. Death was the penalty for casting the horoscope of the emperor, lest he be caught at a vulnerable moment.5
In the countryside, pagani, the villagers, still worshiped tribal deities. In the cities, many traditions had evaporated. Mystery religions emerged to fill the void. They were secretive and exclusive, usually involving seven ranks of initiation, their morality an arch loyalty to their clique.
In the Apocalypse, Jesus condemned pharmaticopaia, generally translated as magic but specifically the use of narcotics by mystery cults. Sexual orgy and torture were practised in some. Every bodily organ seemed to have had its cultists: the worshippers of Bacchus relishing alcohol and the belly; Aphrodite the genitals; Orpheus an ear for music; the Pythagoreans and Elusians the elevation of the brain through mathematics and philosophy. The mystery religions concentrated upon recruiting the rich and powerful.
The Stoics stood aloof from exclusiveness and sensuality. Unhappiness to them was not the result of the outer environment but one’s response to it. In appealing to the universal morality and equality of the golden rule, they had much in accord with Christians. Stoicism was especially appealing to educated men of action in the military, government and imperial trade. Yet in denying the emotions, Stoicism left many people unmoved.
The chief pagan critic of Christianity was Celsus, a Greek writer about 178 who viewed Judaism and Christianity as likewise wrong in holding man made in the image and likeness of God. ‘In no way is man better in God’s sight than ants and bees,’6 was his view. To him, Jews and Christians were ‘like a swarm of bats – or ants creeping out of their nest – or frogs holding a symposium round a swamp – or worms in congress in a patch of mud – debating which of them is the more sinful.’7 To Celsus, moral character was inborn and unchangeable, human freedom nil, the social status quo sacred.8 It was proper that ‘each people worship its own traditional usages, living by ancestral traditions.’ Jews at least did that. Celsus wrote: ‘I think it makes no difference whether you call Zeus the most high or Zeus, or Adonai, or Sabaoth, or Amun like the Egyptians, or Papaios like the Scythians.’9
Celsus spoke of angels and demons and the efficacy of various pagan shrines in foretelling the future, healing the ill and averting catastrophes. Why the gods should answer prayers considering his conviction that they had no fondness towards humans he did not explain.
Human wrongdoing to pagans was hubris, the arrogance of reaching out for that which belonged to the gods. Prometheus, stealing fire from heaven that humans could live as more than wild beasts, was condemned to eternal torment. Asklepios, the god of healing, and Hephaistos, patron of metallurgy, were cast out of heaven for revealing their arts to benefit mankind.
To Jews and Christians, wrong was viewed more often as hamartia, falling short, missing the target. Since man was made in the image and likeness of God, wrong was being less than what one should be.
Celsus described Christians.
We see them in our own houses, cloth and shoemakers and clothes cleaners, the most uneducated and vulgar persons, not daring to say a word in the presence of their masters who are older and wiser; but when they get hold of the children in private, and silly women with them, they are wonderfully eloquent … But if, while they are speaking, they see some of the children’s teachers, some wiser person or their father coming, the more cautious of them will be gone in a moment, and the more impudent will urge on the children to throw off the reins – whispering to them that while their father or their teachers are about, they will not and cannot teach them anything good … they must come with the women and the little children that play with them to the women’s quarters or the shoemakers’ shop or to the cleaners’ to receive perfect knowledge. And that is how they persuade them.10
To Celsus, the Christian God was a ‘most unnatural father’ in allowing his son to be crucified.11
Celsus appealed to an upper class audience learned in Greek literature rather than Roman history or Jewish culture. He despised Christians for their poverty. He attempted to persuade the convinced while ignoring the masses. He offered nothing as a substitute ideal nor did he criticize societies’ injustices.
The first two centuries had produced Rome’s unique moralists, neither religious prophets nor philosophers but comic satirists.
Juvenal, Ovid, Catullus, Martial, Petronius and Apulius – all were scathingly critical of the excesses of the rich and their parasitic hangers-on. They made no claim to being any better than those they savaged. They acknowledged being part of what they condemned. The moral sense they expressed emerged neither from the faith of Jews nor the reason of Greeks, but perhaps some echo of the honestas and aequitas (honesty and fairness) of their Italian peasant ancestors. Ovid described the pessimistic alienation of these comic writers concisely. ‘I hate what I do yet I can do no other.’12
By the third century, satire had disappeared. The gross behaviour lampooned had grown too common. Satire was considered subversive by the government.
The upper classes were paranoid about the slaves surrounding them. Seneca, Nero’s Stoic tutor and victim, had written:
In every slave is a foe. No. We don’t find slaves our foes, we make them so. They are slaves, people say. No, they are human beings. ‘They’re slaves.’ But they share the same roof as ourselves. ‘They’re slaves.’ No. They’re friends, humble friends. ‘They’re slaves.’ Strictly speaking they are our fellow slaves, if you once reflect that fate has as much power over us as over them.13
The pagan physician Galen witnessed a master gouging out the eye of a slave in a fit of rage.14 ‘Our spoilt child existence drives us into tantrums,’ Seneca observed.15 Slaves had virtually no protection in the legal system. Whatever the laws, the judges were usually slave owners. Runaways were returned with the letter F for fugitivius branded on their forehead.
Nero’s accomplice and victim Petronius gloated that ‘Nothing is evil if your master commands it.’16
In Latin fashion, few trusted the laws. What mattered was personal influence. An individual’s power was measured by the number of people dependent upon him as a patrone. Important folk began their day attending to the clientalia, their hangers-on. A patrone guarded by gladiators might dispense from the vestibule of his home money, jobs for the day, letters of recommendation, judgment in quarrels, errands, purchases, bribes and political advice in return for the toadying of a host of semi-employed opportunists dealing in gossip and blackmail for advancement. Termites who would be tyrants, Juvenal called them.17
Shrewdly intelligent slaves placed as stewards managing private estates bought freedom with the wealth they manipulated and became a major element in Roman commerce. The parables in the Gospels speak of similar stewards. Men of similar status as slaves of the government exerted enormous influence. Freedman who had risen to the top of society brought with them contempt towards former superiors once flattered and used. If no worse than their former masters, they lacked their civility.
Gurus of exotic learning and supposed virtue were hired as household exemplars, their speech lofty, their table manners like ‘gulls swooping upon garbage.’18 They fasted, rubbing ashes into their faces to give the semblance of austerity, their private morals ribaldly ridiculed. Great store was given to their interpretation of dreams and rationalizations of employers’ behaviour.
The cities represented Roman civilization yet the vast majority of the populace lived in the countryside, with the weather unpredictable and crop failures common. Galen described rural folk, most of whose wheat and barley was sold to inland cities. They relied chiefly on lentils, peas and beans for food.
The country people during the winter finished the pulses and so during the spring had to fall back upon unhealthy foods. They ate twigs and shoots of trees and bushes, bulbs and roots of indigestible plants, they even filled themselves with weeds or cooked fresh grass. You could see some of them at the end of the spring and practically all at the beginning of summer attacked by various ulcers springing up on the skin …19
The absentee landlord was usually in a city miles away as stewards and bullyboys kept farm labourers in line.
The traditional elite dwindled in numbers, birthrate low and ambition satiated. Ex-slaves or their descendants rose to dominate civil life as halfbarbarian soldiers rose through the ranks to imperial command. Those who had the wisdom to realize how perilously thin was the layer of civilization covering egoistic impulse considered religion to be much of that veneer.
Freedmen whose parents had been slaves were rarely found in an army career until the manpower shortage of the third century loosened recruitment standards. Traditional prejudices held them servile, duplicitous and arrogant. The time had arrived that such men were within reach of political and military control of the Empire. They had a ready solution for Roman problems, a totalitarian state eliminating all pretences of private power. Bureaucracy and militarism were idolized beyond any criticism, the emperor to be worshipped as a living god, the Roman people, in effect, enslaved.
The Emperor Probus, as an Illyrian raised in Egypt, was of an ethnic minority long of service yet neglected in promotion in the army. Aurelian was the first Illyrian emperor. Diocletian, another compatriot, would later follow to the throne. Ethnic minorities long denied rank offered an alternative to the avaricious climbers within the system.
The Illyrians, long snubbed for promotion, could relate to other minorities in the Empire whose talents had long been overlooked. Some might respond by outdoing their suppressors. Probus responded with a willingness to expend good fortune to those without it.
Some would detest his attitude.