8

The Classical World

(4000 BC–476 AD)

How Bronze Age weapons, domesticated horses and wheeled chariots ushered in a new age of violence and inequality

 

THERE IS NO FIXED date when the Bronze Age can be said to start. It began at different times in different places. The earliest known bronze artefacts may have been made as early as 4000 BC in Mesopotamia, where the alloy was used by artisans for making objects such as the Indus Valley dancing girl (see page 115). From about 2000 BC nomadic chiefs living in central Anatolia, an area rich in copper and tin deposits, started to adapt bronze for making armour, shields and weapons in the form of axes, swords and spears. Bronze is hard. People who could craft bronze into weapons and armour were at an immediate military advantage over those with just stone implements or wooden clubs.

Nomads transported precious bronze-making raw materials such as tin and copper from places as far-flung as Cornwall and Wales in the west to the Caucasus mountains in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and beyond to the Middle East and India. Once these traders became expert at making bronze weapons it was a short step to invade, conquer and subjugate the many settled farming communities along their various trading routes between the markets and civilizations of Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Just as significant was the conquest of a wild animal that revolutionized the nomad’s ability to travel long distances. From as far back as about 4000 BC, people travelling around a region of southern Russia called the Pontic Steppe began to discover how to domesticate the wild horse.

Wild horses called tarpans roamed the Pontic Steppe near the edges of forests. These herd animals were tamed, bred and broken in as slaves for humans. Originally more the size of ponies than thoroughbreds, tarpans are now extinct: the last known specimen died in a Moscow zoo in 1875. No one knows exactly when the first tarpans began to be bred in captivity, nor who first managed to mount one, but since they were small the first breeds were better suited to pulling carts and carrying loads than transporting people.

Chariots had begun to appear in Mesopotamia by 2600 BC, according to a beautiful painted box called the Standard of Ur discovered by British archaeologist Leonard Woolley in the 1920s. This box, now on display at the British Museum, includes a graphic image of ‘War’, with Sumerian spearmen following a four-wheeled chariot pulled by what look like horses, cows or oxen.

Nomadic traders from the Russian steppes were probably the first to possess the triple combination of domesticated horses, wheeled chariots and bronze weapons. They also learned to increase the loads that their horses could pull by using spoked rather than solid wheels, making their chariots lighter and more manoeuvrable in battle.

Gradually from about 3500 BC their way of life spread across Europe, eventually reaching Britain, Ireland and Spain, imposing a new order ruled by a more aggressive, male-dominated society built on controlling horses and making metal weapons. Traces of this cultural shift can be seen in fragments of a style of pottery found all over Europe, originating from the Pontic Steppe. These pots were made in the shape of an upturned bell and were probably used by well-off families to contain mead or beer. This is why theirs is known as the Bell Beaker Culture.

Speed, height and extra strength gave people with domesticated horses a huge military advantage over those without. Horses provided a means of transport at least five times quicker than any other known at the time. Reconnaissance, fast communications and the precious element of surprise were now at a rider’s discretion, powerfully exacerbating the potential for terrorism, blackmail, subjugation and war.

Thanks to the unsavoury combination of wheels, horses and bronze, from about 1800 BC until 500 BC Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East were in constant turmoil. Wave upon wave of horsemen wielding bronze and iron weapons availed themselves of each and every opportunity to conquer and invade.

The Age of Heroes

The period between 1400 and 1100 BC set the stage for some of the most epic military struggles of all time including the legendary Trojan Wars, supposedly fought between a confederation of small Greek states and the people of Troy, a city in western Asia Minor. Accounts of the wars are contained in the Greek poet Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which, although partly mythological, provide a vivid account of the chaos and violence of the late Mediterranean Bronze Age.

Another famous piece of literature tells of more violence and distress erupting further south, in Egypt, Jordan and Israel, at about the same time.

Like Homer’s poems, the first five books of the Bible were written down many hundreds of years after the events they describe are supposed to have taken place. These religious texts are sacred to Jews and Christians, some of whom believe every word they contain to be literally the true word of God. As a piece of history, however, they are as confusing as they are vivid. The most dramatic historical events in these early books are the exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt and the plagues sent by God through Moses to punish the Egyptian Pharaoh for enslaving his chosen people. No one really knows quite when these events are supposed to have happened. Estimates range from 1650 BC to about 1200 BC, which is when the first archaeological evidence of the Israelite settlement of the Promised Land of Canaan (now Israel) can be traced.

The scriptures tell how the Jewish people were descended from Abraham, a nomadic herdsman from the Mesopotamian city of Ur, who was instructed by God to travel to the land of Canaan. In return for being worshipped as the only true God, he gave this land to Abraham and his ‘seed’ for ever. The scriptures go on to say that Abraham had two sons by two different women. Ishmael was his first, born to a servant girl called Hagar. Then came Isaac, born to Abraham’s wife Sarah. One of Isaac’s children, Jacob, had twelve sons, each of whom became leader of one the twelve tribes of Israel from which Jewish people claim their descent.

After the Jewish people settled in their Promised Land (from c.1000 BC) a series of conflicts ensued with neighbouring civilizations including the Assyrians and Babylonians, the end result of which was the sacking and burning of both Jewish capitals – Samaria (722 BC) and Jerusalem (586 BC) – following which the surviving Jews were enslaved in Babylon. At this point it looked as if the chosen people of God might leave the books of history for ever. But just seventy years after their eviction from Jerusalem they were saved by a Persian emperor called Cyrus, one of the first rulers in recorded history that posterity has since called ‘the Great’.

Religious tolerance in Persia

Cyrus’s Persian Empire was remarkable for its respect for other cultures and religions. Local rulers, called satraps, were installed as the governors of conquered lands. After capturing Babylon, Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and ordered the building of a new temple ‘with the expense met out of the King’s household’. As a result, Cyrus is the only non-Jew to be honoured in the Bible as a messiah, a divinely appointed king sent by their one god Yahweh.

The Jews, almost driven to extinction twice, were determined to lay claim to their Promised Land once and for all. The stories of the Old Testament – called the Tanakh in Hebrew – were written down by scribes, edited and finally canonized as the official word of God in about 500 BC. Anyone dispossessing them from now on could do so only against a background of prescribed historical illegitimacy and absolute divine displeasure.

Meanwhile, Cyrus had trouble back up north, where nomads from the steppes were threatening the borders of his empire. In 529 BC an offshoot of the Scythians called the Massagetae were in revolt at the head of the Tigris River. They were led by Queen Tomyris, who supposedly had one of her breasts cut off so she could fight more effectively. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Cyrus’s troops began the battle well, killing both of the Queen’s sons and many of her troops. But events swung against them as the battle wore on and eventually Cyrus was slain. So bitter was the Queen at the death of her sons that she had Cyrus’s head chopped off and his skull made into a goblet from which, it is said, she drank fine wine until the day she died.

Despite Cyrus’s death, the Persian empire he created thrived for the next 200 years. Darius I (also called the Great) ruled from 522 to 485 BC and is credited with reorganizing the empire and building a magnificent new capital called Persepolis, in modern-day Iran, with walls twenty metres high and ten metres thick. Darius also dug the first Suez Canal, allowing ships to pass from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea through a channel which, according to Herodotus, was wide enough for two triremes to pass and took four days to navigate.

However, like Cyrus, Darius was plagued by perpetual incursions and invasions by northern nomadic tribes, who, unbeknown to the Persians, were themselves being pushed west by other nomads eager to find wetter lands for grazing their animals. Continual harassment in the end dragged Persia into what became the biggest and bloodiest conflict yet to take place in human history, one which ultimately led to the collapse of the once proud Persian Empire and precipitated the rise of the Greeks.

The beginnings of a rift between East and West

In a bid to put a permanent end to the trouble from the Scythians, Darius took a huge army north in about 512 BC, crossed the Bosporus, the short stretch of sea that divides Europe from Asia, and pressed on into what is modern-day Greece. He marched as far as the Danube intending to attack the Scythians from the rear. Unfortunately, thanks to an incorrect understanding of the geography of the region, Darius missed his intended target altogether and instead attacked and subjugated the people of Thrace and Macedonia in northern Greece.

This pre-emptive attack badly backfired. Proud, independently minded Greek cities such as Athens and Eretria encouraged a revolt against Persian rule in western Turkey, led by the Greek Ionians. Darius counter-attacked in 492 BC, but was defeated at the Battle of Marathon two years later, an event which sent shock waves throughout his empire. It was the moment that signalled the beginning of Greek independence from mighty Persia. Greek city after Greek city now declared itself free from foreign rule. Instead of having a buffer zone against the nomadic tribes of the western steppes, the Persians had unleashed a new foe, led by the increasingly powerful maritime city of Athens.

Darius died soon after Marathon. In 480 BC his son Xerxes prepared to put an end to this new European menace and sacked Athens, burning it to the ground. However, the citizens of the city had escaped to a nearby island, from where they watched as the flames from their homes lit up the night sky. The final act commenced in September, when the Greek and Persian navies clashed at Salamis. The Persians’ large triremes proved too clumsy against the more manoeuvrable Greek ships and their navy was ignominiously destroyed.

Europe and Asia were now truly at war. Conflicts between the Persian cultures of the Middle East and the European cultures of the West invariably meant that the Jewish people got caught up in the middle. How little some things have changed.

Athenian democracy

Signs of a distinctive, new and eccentric pattern of human behaviour began to occur in what became the most famous of all the Greek city states – Athens. Long before the Persians razed the city to the ground in 480 BC this city had become a laboratory for experiments in novel human behaviour. In c.594 BC a poet called Solon won a victory for the city by capturing the nearby island of Salamis. He used the considerable power and prestige gained from this triumph to seize political control.

Solon’s reforms involved redistributing political power so that it wasn’t just the most powerful families who participated in politics and the judicial process. He created a system that can now be recognized as the first attempt to create a democratic government – one in which the population at large had a say. Nobles remained the city’s magistrates, but Solon introduced juries into almost every social dispute, and so, for the first time, involved ordinary citizens in the deliberations of justice.

Part of the reason Athenians could afford to spend so much time in political and judicial deliberation was the highly nutritious olives that grew in groves tumbling down to the Mediterranean shores. Because they were so easy to grow, preserve, transport and trade, these fruits afforded the Greeks riches in the form of spare time with which to experiment with new ways of life and observe how the natural world works.

Greek science

At just about the same time, the beginnings of what was soon to become a revolution in scientific and religious thought were emerging just across the narrow stretch of sea separating Europe from Asia – the Bosporus.

Miletus, on the west coast of Turkey, was home to a man called Thales (born c.640 BC), who became famous for correctly predicting that a solar eclipse would take place on the afternoon of 28 May 585 BC. Thales demonstrated that the movements of the planets could be predicted using a set of astronomical tables originally compiled by holy men in Babylon and Egypt. The invasions of Darius the Great had brought such knowledge, stored on clay tablets, into western Turkey. When these fell into the hands of someone like Thales, with a keen eye for numbers and mathematics, patterns began to emerge that could then be extrapolated to predict events like a solar eclipse.

Anyone who could make an accurate prediction of something as dramatic as a solar eclipse was bound to make quite a stir in a world where such events were traditionally believed to be caused by the arbitrary whims of all-powerful gods. Thales’ reputation spread fast, far and wide. The discovery of a set of rules that governed the movement of the planets in the heavens also led some people to wonder what else in nature worked on similarly predictable lines. Thales’ lifelong quest for a set of universal laws to explain nature was taken up by other philosophers, many of whom lived in Athens.

Greek philosophy

Socrates (470–399 BC) was a famous Athenian philosopher who also believed in a set of natural universal laws. Like Buddha (see page 136), Socrates thought a man’s soul could be improved over time, but not through mastering stillness of the mind – rather the opposite. For Socrates the path to enlightenment involved the application of problem-solving reason, high-powered discussion and heated debate.

By about 460 BC debate, argument, rhetoric and oratory had become the chief virtues of civic life in Athenian society. For Socrates, these skills were at the core of his philosophical method. Nothing that he actually wrote has survived, but we know a great deal about him and his ideas thanks to his pupil Plato, who also became one of the most influential philosophers of all time.

Plato’s most famous philosophical work, The Republic, features a debate about the best way to rule a human society. Plato also believed that what underpinned the universe was a reality that didn’t originate from the traditional ragbag of Greek gods like Zeus, Apollo and Aphrodite, who inflicted their fancies on an unsuspecting world. Instead, Plato believed that the truth could be revealed through philosophical reasoning and contemplation. Therefore, in his description of an ideal society, it was philosopher-kings who ruled society, sharing the wisdom of their insights with their subjects.

A Spartan experiment

One notion proposed by Plato was the suggestion that if man could successfully control nature by selectively breeding plants and animals then why shouldn’t society apply the same techniques to humans? ‘The brave man is to be selected for marriage more frequently than the rest so that as many children as possible may have such a man for their father.’

This radical idea was put into practice by the southern Greek city of Sparta, which from 431 to 404 BC led a league of city states locked in a vicious war against the growing power of Athens and her empire. The secret behind the power of this city, which eventually overthrew mighty Athens in 404 BC, was a prime example of how mankind was beginning to organize itself in experimental new ways. Sparta was a totalitarian military society at its most pure and powerful.

Lycurgus (c.700–630 BC), its legendary founder, decreed that baby boys born too weak to become soldiers should be abandoned and left to die on the desolate slopes of Mount Taygetos. All the others were sent off to a military training camp at the age of seven to learn to become fearless warriors. Boys were initiated into the camp only after running the gauntlet of older youths, who would flog them with whips, sometimes causing the weakest to die on the spot, thus furthering the selective breeding principle. Instead of being fed, the boys were encouraged to steal food. They were punished if they were caught – not for stealing, but for being clumsy enough to have been spotted.

Spartan soldiers, called hoplites, were expected to put the welfare of the city above duty to their families. They were trained in the discipline of the phalanx – a highly effective form of warfare in which troops were linked together into a human wall. Rectangular formations of tightly packed soldiers, at least four lines deep, with shields and spears locked closely together, were trained to march towards the enemy to the beat of pipes and drums, breaking into a run just before battle commenced. A phalanx required total loyalty and depended on every man in the fighting force. Just one drooping shield, like a weak link in a chain, could expose the whole formation to failure. The force with the strongest, most fearless soldiers, who pushed hardest from the rear, invariably won. Young soldiers were rewarded for military victory by being given the opportunity to couple with as many as twenty Spartan women, providing a powerful incentive to be brave in war. Failure on the battlefield was not an option. A hoplite returning from battle alive but without his shield was disowned by his family and sentenced to death.

Spartan society impressed not only some ancient philosophers like Plato but later ideologies such as the Hitler Youth Movement of the 1930s, where children were taught that their duty to the state was of greater importance than to the individual or the family (see page 279).

Spartan women were given a higher status in society than anywhere else in ancient Greece. By cultivating beauty, intelligence and strength in their females, the Spartans believed they could succeed in producing a master race. Men and women, both naked, trained for athletics championships alongside each other, with the women even participating in flogging contests to see who had the most endurance, an ordeal known as diamastigosis.

The origin of the Olympic Games

With Greek social structures so completely based around physical fitness, selective breeding and military victory, it is no wonder that an athletics championship should have been established to test the limits of human physical prowess in a competitive context. By the fifth and sixth centuries BC the games had come to have enormous importance in Greek society. Each city state fielded its best athletes in the hope of winning the ultimate accolade in civic pride. Winners were immortalized with poems, statues and, the most prestigious honour of all, a crown made of olive leaves.

Like all empires, Sparta’s dominance eventually waned. Its experiment in human engineering ultimately failed through a lack of popular support and a dwindling supply of willing and able males to keep its armies big and strong. But by about 380 BC another force was already marshalling itself to the north of ancient Greece – one which, although it put an end to the independence of the city states, proved instrumental in spreading across the world their various templates of how human civilizations could engage with nature, through the debates of democracy, the systems of science or the traumas of totalitarianism.

Aristotle, the great Greek teacher

Greek philosophers were edging towards the radical idea that there were no gods or God who controlled the destiny of life on earth from some detached mountaintop; rather, it was man himself, who, thanks to his own brainpower, could decipher the laws of the universe to become master of all nature.

Supreme amongst such thinkers was Aristotle (384–322 BC), the scope of whose works was truly immense. They covered everything from speculations on the nature of the human soul to the physics of the universe, from city politics and personal ethics to the history of plants and animals, and from public speaking and poetry to music, memory and logic.

Aristotle combined what he considered the best of what he had learned from his teacher Plato and other Greek philosophers like Thales with everything he observed in the natural world. It led him to a single, profound conclusion: underneath all reality there was indeed a fundamental set of universal natural laws that explained everything to do with life, the universe and everything from human politics to the weather. To understand these rules of nature was to understand reality. The key was careful observation of the universe and its systems by good use of the human senses, and then using human reason and intellect to uncover the truth.

The question that Aristotle’s scientific, rational view of the world provoked was this: in a mechanistic universe governed by rules, what place was there for old-fashioned, whimsical gods? His answer was simple. The rules of nature themselves were the very essence of all that is divine in the universe: ‘For God is to us a law, impartial, admitting not to correction or change, and better I think and surer than those which are engraved upon tablets.’

Aristotle gave mankind the confidence to explore, discover and learn. But such insights would be useless hidden in the mind of one brilliant man, or stored in a rich patron’s library. To fulfil their potential, these ideas needed a force to scatter them far and wide, giving as many human cultures as possible the chance to exert the power of human brains over nature’s brawn.

Alexander, the great Greek conqueror

As luck would have it, Aristotle’s pupil the young Prince Alexander of Macedon was just the right man at just the right time. Quite possibly it was his great teacher’s passion for the natural world that fired Alexander, impregnating him with a feverish determination to see everything in the world for himself, conquering whatever empires lay en route.

Alexander ascended to the throne of Macedonia in north Greece at the age of just twenty, in 336 BC. For the next thirteen years he led an army of 42,000 Greek soldiers on an extraordinary military adventure across Persia, Egypt and even into India (see plate 8). On his way Alexander famously undid the impossible-to-untie Gordian knot by slashing it with his sword and routed the Persian Emperor Darius III at the Battle of Issus in 333 BC. He then marched down the Mediterranean coast, laying siege to the city of Tyre, which he eventually took after seven months, clearing the way towards Egypt, where, thanks to the decline of Persian power, he was welcomed as a liberator and pronounced Pharaoh in 332 BC. Here Alexander founded the most famous of all the cities named after himself, Alexandria, establishing it as the main sea port linking Egypt with Greece, the maritime axis of a new and increasingly powerful Hellenic empire.

Eighteen months later Alexander left Egypt, marching back to Persia, where again he defeated Darius, at the Battle of Gaugamela (see plate 8). This time the Persian King fled from the battlefield only to be murdered by his own troops in the mountains of Media. The way was now open for Alexander to conquer all Persia, first marching on Babylon, then Susa, the ancient Assyrian capital, and finally Persepolis, the magnificent royal home of the Persian Kings.

With the death of Darius and the submission of Egypt and Persia, Alexander’s military goals had been accomplished. But still the warrior in him could not be controlled. Having sent many of his Greek soldiers back home, he now paid mercenaries to fight for him in a new imperial army, and set off on a three-year campaign to subjugate Scythia and Afghanistan before reaching the River Indus in northern India.

Despite Alexander’s determination to cross the sacred River Ganges and march into the heart of India, his men had reached their limit. Eventually Alexander and a company of soldiers made their way back to Persia across deserts and plains. On the afternoon of 10 June 323 BC in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II in Babylon Alexander died, probably of malaria. He was one month short of his thirty-third birthday.

Many historians have devoted their professional lives to the study of this man, yet no one really knows what drove him to try to conquer the world. Whatever his motivation, his conquests caused the Greek language to become the lingua franca of the entire Middle East and Egypt. Thousands of Greek people, some soldiers, others merchants, artisans, scientists and philosophers, moved abroad, taking with them their experimental world views. Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, five were Greek constructions – each one an awesome monument to these people’s confidence in man’s power over the natural world.

Roman love for all things Greek was particularly focused around the personality and career of Alexander, who after his death became antiquity’s greatest role model. Roman emperors came to regard Alexander as the epitome of bravery, strength and courage.

The Roman supremacy

Rome’s rise and fall was like a human weather system as destructive as nature’s most violent hurricanes. This enormous whirlwind was powered by three essential ingredients: grain, booty and slaves. Once the storm was over the landscape of Europe looked quite different, while the legacy of what made the ferocious ancient Roman Empire so powerful helped shape the rest of European history to come.

Roman legends give a clue as to what made these people tick because there is so much similarity between them and the mythological tales from Greece. The Romans were brilliant copycats. Infantry tactics, mythology, art and architecture came from Greece, while their heavy cavalry and expertise in horses came from Persia. When the Romans wanted to attack the most powerful maritime city in the region, the Phoenicians’ Carthage, they simply captured one of its ships and within the space of about two months built themselves an entire fleet of more than a hundred similar ships from scratch.

An early threat to the rise of Rome came in the form of a famous Carthaginian general called Hannibal, who in 218 BC marched an army of mercenary soldiers and African war elephants all the way up Spain and across the Alps. His surprise attack from the north led to several victories, the most famous being at the Battle of Cannae (216 BC) near Apulia in south-east Italy, where Hannibal’s cavalry encircled the massed ranks of Roman infantry, cutting them to pieces. In the end, though, Roman persistence paid off. Knowing that Hannibal didn’t have the equipment to breach the walls of the city of Rome itself, the Roman forces just waited, shadowing his armies, watching his tactics, but always avoiding battle. Meanwhile, another Roman army, under the leadership of a young commander, Scipio, defeated the Carthaginian forces in Spain and crossed the short stretch of sea to Africa, where they marched towards Carthage itself. Hannibal had no choice but to return home to try to save his own city but there he was defeated at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC.

By this time the Romans had become a highly efficient war machine, expanding their frontiers all round the Mediterranean and adapting their tactics to incorporate cavalry and ships. With each conquest they brought home huge hoards of booty in the form of treasure and prisoners of war who they turned into slaves. Plunder paid for a fabulously rich lifestyle for Rome’s citizens, while imported slaves provided free labour in their homes, on the farms, in the city streets and on the many enormous construction projects that quickly turned Rome into the most advanced artificial world on earth.

By 146 BC a succession of military victories had brought Greece into the Roman Empire, followed in 129 BC by Asia Minor. From here the Romans had the perfect bridgehead to launch a series of campaigns in the Near East, conquering Armenia, Lebanon, Syria and Judaea by 64 BC under the leadership of the general Pompey, each time adding further riches to their economy in the form of gold, silver and slaves. To the south the Roman general Octavian, who later became the Emperor Caesar Augustus, added the jewel in the crown – the conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. With its almost limitless supplies of grain from the Nile Valley, the Egyptian bread basket provided the perfect finishing touch, supplying unlimited quantities of food throughout the Roman Empire.

But at the centre of the Roman grip on power lay an intractable problem. What does a civilization that is built on military conquest and financial growth do when it finds that, for various reasons, it cannot expand any more? Gaul (modern-day France) had been brought under Roman control by Julius Caesar in 46 BC and Britain was finally subjugated after the failed revolt of Boudicca at the Battle of Watling Street in 61 AD. But further expansion towards Scotland proved profitless and eventually the Romans built a wall to keep out the violent Picts. In the north-east the Romans were forced to post several legions along the natural border of the Rhine/Danube Rivers in an effort to contain Germanic tribes such as the Goths and Vandals, who, despite numerous attempts, they found impossible to bring under control. To the east a new Persian Empire had overthrown the Greek dynasties which succeeded Alexander. Their Azatan knights successfully held the Romans back from the rich lands of the Middle East. Then there were nature’s barriers. To the west, after Spain, there was the edge of the world – the apparently endless Atlantic Ocean. To the south, beyond Carthage and Egypt, there was just dry, barren, lifeless desert.

The story of the later Roman Empire is the tale of how a human civilization fixed on violence and growth managed to hold itself together despite reaching expansion’s elastic limit. Thanks to a variety of ingenious and often brutal strategies the ruling Roman oligarchy was able to sustain its luxurious standard of living for an impressive 300 years after the major phase of expansion ended.

Imperial Rome’s first survival tactic was political. Tyrannical rule was necessary to force through a rapid succession of reforms needed to hold this violent society together. At least 40 per cent of the capital city’s massive population were slaves. They made a doomed attempt at breaking the grip of imperial and dictatorial government when a leader called Spartacus, an escaped Greek gladiator, rallied them to rebellion in 79 BC. After some initial successes they were eventually routed by the general Marcus Crassus in southern Italy. More than 6,000 were crucified, their crosses set up along the 130-kilometre stretch of road from Capua to Rome. Crassus ordered that their bodies never be removed. There they remained as rotten carcasses for many years, a gruesome memorial of what happened to slaves who disobeyed their masters.

Other strategies were also deployed by Roman rulers to keep the huge population of their capital city under firm control. One tactic was to divert the poor and enslaved into building projects to provide improved amenities for the well off. With this policy the Roman Empire rapidly became the fountain from which mammoth engineering works were undertaken all over its conquered lands. Many of its ruins survive today across Europe, North Africa and the Near East.

Exploiting labour from slaves and the poor gave birth to Europe’s first comprehensive road network – essential infrastructure for keeping order and control in an empire that at its biggest, in about 100 AD, covered over five million square kilometres. Slaves, supervised by soldiers, built more than 85,000 kilometres of road, most of it in straight lines, making man’s first long cuts of bricks, cement and concrete into Europe’s supple surfaces. Everything that got in the way, from forests to farms, was razed to the ground.

Spectacular forms of mass-market entertainment were another part of the system for keeping the overpopulated Roman capital governable. Riches won in suppressing a Jewish revolt against Roman rule that began in 66 AD financed the cost of building Rome’s giant Flavian amphitheatre (the Colosseum), which was constructed under the Emperor Vespasian.

When it was opened in 80 AD, this theatre could seat more than 50,000 spectators – comparable to many large modern sports stadiums. A new Emperor, Titus, celebrated the opening of this temple to entertainment by giving the people of Rome a hundred days of spectacular drama in the form of mock battles, gladiator fights, animal hunts and executions. According to the contemporary historian Dio Cassius, more than 11,000 wild animals were killed in these games. Many of them, such as lions, crocodiles, elephants, giraffes, panthers, leopards, hippos, rhinos and ostriches, were imported from outside the Empire. Attendance was free. The Emperor came to the games so his people could admire him in all his glory. He was only too happy to see the most violent of the Roman underclass gratified and in one location, safe under the watchful eye of imperial troops.

Jesus, the subversive Jewish carpenter’s son

In the midst of this hurricane of indulgence, exploitation and violence there was a miraculous moment of calm. As if it were the eye of the imperial storm, almost exactly halfway through Rome’s dominance of the Mediterranean world, a son was born to a Jewish carpenter and his wife in a place called Bethlehem, a town situated just south of Jerusalem. His name was Jesus.

Like the Buddha some 500 years before, Jesus was an enlightened charismatic who made a virtue out of poverty and lectured on the benefits of non-violence. His message was simple. Be peaceful. Love your neighbour as yourself. If someone strikes you on one cheek do not hit back but offer them the other. Do not worship false idols such as money or material possessions and, above all, be humble – for one day the meek will inherit the earth.

Jesus’s followers saw him perform miracles and came to regard him as the earthly incarnation of God as prophesied by Isaiah and others in the Jewish Torah. One of the most deeply held Jewish beliefs was that at the time of the covenants between God, Abraham and Moses the Israelites were identified as God’s chosen people. Yet here was a man whose followers claimed he was King of the Jews and who offered the prospect of eternal salvation to anyone and everyone who believed in him, regardless of their colour, race or creed!

Jesus was given over to the Roman governor of the province of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, as a heretic, and despite Pilate’s misgivings was condemned to die on a cross like a common criminal. His body mysteriously disappeared three days after being placed in a tomb and his disciples began to see visions of him. They wrote about these miraculous events, which they called the Resurrection, and believed it was their divine mission to spread the good news about the son of God coming down to earth and dying on a cross so that everyone who believed in him might have everlasting life. They set about establishing a religion in his name.

How Christianity was adopted by Rome

The early Christian Church developed a huge popular following because it filled a spiritual vacuum inherent in the materialistic, brutal and unequal society of the Roman Empire. Its main appeal was to non-Jewish poor people, women and slaves. Everyday life in the Roman Empire was proof enough for these people that the pantheon of Greek/Roman gods had nothing much to offer in terms of spiritual nourishment or hope for the future. The idea that the son of God had come to free them and offer them eternal salvation in his Kingdom of Heaven sounded a lot more promising.

Another community attracted towards Jesus’s teaching were those keen to establish a new hierarchy to resist the seemingly infinite power of Roman society. Greek thinkers who followed the idea of a universal force of nature first put forward by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle found the concept of a single universal God who was open to all people rather compelling. The biggest problem for them was how to reconcile this all-pervasive divine force with a carpenter’s son from Galilee whose followers claimed he was the incarnation of God.

The problem wasn’t finally settled until after Christianity was legalized in the Roman Empire by the Emperor Galerius in 311 AD in a desperate bid to contain the increasing threat the new religion posed to Rome’s imperial authority. In the end the idea of the Trinity provided the answer. It combined the Jewish God of the Old Testament as the Father with the person of Jesus Christ as his Son and the divine platonic or natural force pervading all things as the Holy Spirit. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit make up the Trinity that still marks out Christianity as distinct from other religions. This doctrine was finally ratified and codified into an official creed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, under the auspices of the first truly Christian Roman Emperor Constantine.

In 330 AD Constantine established a new capital for the eastern portion of the Empire, which became known as Constantinople (now Istanbul). Here he promoted Christianity by building churches and forbade pagan temples. Despite this, most of his imperial staff remained pagans, showing that whatever his own personal beliefs Constantine, like the Persian Cyrus the Great, was a tolerant ruler.

But Roman religious understanding was not to last long. One of this empire’s final legacies was to throw out all notions of religious freedom and instead adopt Christianity as a compulsory state creed. This act, sanctioned by Emperor Theodosius I (ruled 379–95 AD), turned the brief light of toleration into a fury of indignation against all non-Christian faiths. Under the influence of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, Theodosius outlawed all variations of the Christian faith except for the Trinitarian beliefs set down in the Nicene Creed. Bishops who disagreed were expelled, many of them fleeing to the more tolerant Sassanid regime in Persia. Traditional Graeco-Roman paganism was outlawed too. The eternal flame in the Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum was extinguished and the Vestal Virgins disbanded. In their place came the Christian world’s first law against witchcraft. Finally, in 393 AD, Theodosius abolished the highly cherished Olympic Games, since, he claimed, they were a relic of the pagan past.

The Roman Empire finally collapsed due to a variety of destabilizing forces including invasions by Germanic tribes, the arrival of the Huns from the Mongolian steppes and resistance by the early Christians. Historians usually date its fall to 476 AD, when the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last Emperor of the Western Empire, Romulus Augustus.

What made Roman civilization so remarkable in the classical world was its ability to survive so long, despite its addiction to the constant economic growth needed to feed the insatiable appetites of its rich ruling class. It ruthlessly suppressed the poor by enlisting them as soldiers for its armies or slave labourers for its engineering projects. It controlled its huge populations through mass-entertainment programmes and propaganda. It exploited the earth’s natural mineral resources when further military expansion proved impossible, and it hijacked a minority religious sect to incorporate a new state religion with a fierce intolerance for anything its leaders deemed as heresy.

Such tactics became powerful templates for the future. They were subject to repeated reincarnation in various guises, initially across the fractious lands of Europe and the arid deserts of the Middle East, but later throughout the entire world. Thanks to the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the relationship between human civilizations and nature lurched into a new phase that helped set the stage for the beginning of the modern world.