If you were asked what was the best period of human history to live in, what time and place would you choose? Swinging New York in Gatsby’s “Roaring Twenties”? The Elizabethan England of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson? The Florence of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Lorenzo the Magnificent? Periclean Athens? Kublai Khan’s resplendent Cathay? India under the wise and benevolent Ashoka?
For Edward Gibbon, celebrated eighteenth-century historian of the Roman Empire, friend of luminaries like Hume and Voltaire, and faithful representative of Enlightenment sensibilities, the answer was obvious:
If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the history of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus [i.e., from AD 96 to 180]. The vast extent of the Roman empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose character and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves the accountable ministers of the laws. . . .
The labours of these monarchs were over-paid by . . . the exquisite delight of beholding the general happiness of which they were the authors.1
In short, the period was a “golden age.”2
Gibbon was idiosyncratic in his intensity, perhaps, and also in his specificity, but not in his general sentiment. Adulation of the classical world—of “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome”3—has been a recurring theme among Western thinkers.4 Indeed, at least since the Renaissance, an effort to reclaim or reconstruct the ethos and civitas of classical antiquity has been—and continues to be (though perhaps less overtly, as Virgil, Ovid, and Cicero fade from the curriculum)—a shaping influence in the formation of the Western world.
But why? The Antonine emperors may have been admirable rulers, comparatively speaking; their reign may stand out as a relative bright spot in a world history that sometimes seems, as Gibbon put it, “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”5 Still, to assert without qualification that “a man”—any man, in other words; and, as we will see, the masculine gender is apt here—would “without hesitation” prefer that period over all others seems an audacious claim. So, what was it about the period that made it so “golden”? What was the basis of the “general happiness” that Gibbon discerned, or thought he discerned?
“Every Refinement of Conveniency, of Elegance, and of Splendour”
Gibbon’s effusive declaration supplies one reason: the period was “prosperous.” This prosperity was a natural result of the Pax Romana, and of the trade permeating the “vast extent of the Roman empire.” In this respect, the empire achieved the same commercial goals sought after by international political and trade agreements today. On a material level, consequently, life was good in this period, at least for the affluent—for people, basically, of the same class to which Gibbon himself 6 and his readers belonged in their own eighteenth-century world. Nor was material affluence merely crass; it was matched by a kind of cultural abundance and elegance.
So let us suppose that you are so fortunate as to belong to the affluent class in the age of the Antonine emperors. Like Gibbon, you are wealthy enough, let’s say, but not extravagantly rich—not so rich that you can afford a palazzo or a sprawling country villa. Even so, you might reside in an elegantly decorated home comparable to those that can be visited today in archeologically restored Pompeii7—a domus nicely adorned with stately columns, an interior decorative pool in the atrium just inside the front entrance, colorful mosaics and murals, sculptures imported from Greece, and graceful gardens ornamented with (as a more recent historian reports) “shrubs, fountains, decorative statuettes, and often frescoes on the enclosing walls” (737). The furniture filling out your home will include bronze or marble tables “supported by elaborate legs compounded of lions’ paws, volutes, griffins’ foreparts, and the like” (731).
On a warm summer evening, you and your guests might enjoy a leisurely dinner out of doors, in enchanting fashion. “Sheltered by an awning or a vine-arbour and cushioned by mattresses and pillows, the diners would recline on their elbows in the Greek manner, picking titbits from a central table or, like Pliny’s guests, from floating dishes in the form of little boats and water-birds; as night drew on, lamps would be lit in surrounding candelabra, some of them . . . suspended from the hands of bronze statues” (739). The dinner fare is sumptuous, and exotic. “The guests were treated to a whole sequence of unnerving surprises: peahen’s eggs containing beccaficos rolled in spiced egg-yolk, a wild boar containing live thrushes, a pig full of sausages and black puddings, cakes and fruit filled with liquid saffron, thrushes made of pastry and stuffed with raisins and nuts, quinces decorated with thorns to look like sea-urchins” (740).
And, of course, wine: “no meal was complete without a jar of a fine vintage.” These culinary delights would be served up in “superb beakers, cups, bowls, and dishes decorated with repousse reliefs of plants, arabesques or mythological scenes, together with the simpler, but still elegant, spoons and ladles” (740).
So far, what’s not to like? (I admit with some embarrassment that I have no idea what beccaficos are, or quinces, or volutes—but I infer that they all would have been in impeccably good taste.)
If you feel like going out, you might join your fellow citizens and subjects as a spectator at a chariot race at the Circus Maximus. Or perhaps a stirring gladiatorial contest at the Flavian Amphitheater (later known as the Colosseum), where you will cheer wildly along with your fellow Romans at the hunt and slaughter of exotic animals imported from Africa; and you will feel the thrill and solidarity as you and your fellows collectively implore the emperor to give thumbs up or thumbs down to some hapless warrior.
But then again, maybe (like Gibbon, who shunned sports even as a clumsy schoolboy)8 you are a more sedate soul, lacking a taste for these muscular and bloody spectacles. In that case, you might prefer to attend the theater. Or maybe relax at one of the vast and elegant public baths, designed for leisurely repose and conversation, with cold and warm baths, open spaces for exercising, and even libraries, and lavishly decorated with sculptures and intricate mosaics.
Returning home but not yet ready to sleep, you might curl up with a history by Tacitus or Livy, or with a play by Terence or Plautus (or of course, by one of the Greek masters). Or maybe a work of philosophy by Plato or Aristotle or, if you prefer, by a homegrown thinker—the estimable Cicero. Or perhaps some poetry—the majestic epics of Homer or Virgil, or if you are in the mood for something a little lighter, perhaps some amorous stanzas of Catullus to his lover Lesbia or the seduction poetry of Ovid.
Speaking of seduction: your sophisticated society perfectly understands and amply accommodates the more sensual necessities. Indeed, in the Roman idiom this is one popular euphemism for the male organ—“the necessity.”9 Overall, your world is, as Norman Cantor says, “a sexual paradise.”10 There are, to be sure, a few constraints. It is against the law to lie with your neighbor’s wife, for example (though such indiscretions happen, possibly quite often), and although homosexual encounters are in themselves perfectly respectable, it is shameful and unmanly to take the passive role in such an exchange. We will say more about these restrictions in due course. For now, the important point is that there are no prudish or moralistic impediments to sexual activity per se.11 On the contrary, your society unashamedly celebrates—and stimulates, and amply provides for—sexual gratification.
So your own bedroom lamps or hand mirrors are most likely decorated with erotic images—quite imaginative ones, probably.12 The walls in your atrium might exhibit a fresco similar to that restored in Pompeii—of the fertility god Priapus, with his enormous, ineluctable phallus straining to reach what appears to be a basket of fruit. Similar images adorn doorbells or doorposts, and also the walls of the changing rooms in the elegant public baths.13 And the city maintains numerous, much-frequented brothels. In these establishments, sex is eminently affordable—about the price of a loaf of bread.14
True, as a member of the aristocracy, you may have reservations about taking your pleasures in brothels. Not because they are immoral, but because they are, well, “vulgar.”15 But not to worry: your Roman society smiles on the more elegant practice of having conjugal relations with slaves, which are plentiful—probably constituting about two-fifths of the city’s population.16 As an affluent Roman, you likely own an assortment of them, perhaps hundreds,17 and since with slaves consent is conveniently not an issue,18 the opportunities for sexual fulfillment are ample.19
We are assuming here, as is no doubt already apparent, that you are not only affluent but also male. For women, opportunities for sexual fulfillment are much more limited and the strictures for deviation more severe.20 Much later—centuries later—this distinction will come to seem unfair. But the different standards make excellent sense on the premises of your own society (which we will look at more closely in a few pages). Indeed, women themselves are among the most ardent defenders of the different sexual standards for men and women.21
So it all seems very gratifying. The criterion so often invoked by modern thinkers and ethicists to characterize the good life is “human flourishing.” Just what “human flourishing” consists of is not obvious—the term is obligingly opaque—but whatever it means, wouldn’t it seem amply to fit the sort of life in the Roman Empire that we have been observing? Gibbon thought so, at any rate; as he put it, “the favourites of fortune united every refinement of conveniency, of elegance, and of splendour; whatever could sooth their pride or gratify their sensuality.”22
Of course, less laudatory assessments are also available. There will always be naysayers. So if we were to take our instruction from, say, the satirical poet Juvenal, writing during the period so admired by Gibbon, we might come away with a very different impression of Rome—as a city of perilous streets and fire-plagued tenement housing, a city pervasively indolent, hypocritical, and corrupt, stocked with licentious husbands and faithless, conniving wives, in which it is next to impossible to make an honest living.23 A critic might also notice the pervasive, abject poverty. Robin Lane Fox observes that “the modern cardboard cities of refugees in Egypt or Pakistan are the nearest we can come to imagining this ‘other Rome,’ although they lack Rome’s openly accepted slavery.”24 Rodney Stark describes the cities of the Roman Empire as “far more crowded, crime infested, filthy, disease-ridden, and miserable than are third world cities in the world today.”25
Or we might focus more severely on the bloody gladiatorial spectacles, in which thousands of humans and wild animals were routinely slaughtered for the entertainment of, and with the delirious enthusiasm of, spectators both noble and plebeian. Gibbon did not approve of such shows—they “degraded a civilized nation below the condition of savage cannibals”26—but, always broad-minded, he did not allow this embarrassment to interfere with his overall favorable judgment.
There was also the widespread and socially accepted practice of exposure of infants: parents of unwanted or unhealthy children would abandon the babies on a street corner or outside the town, hoping that someone might come along to rescue the infants. The hope was not utterly unrealistic: in fact, a few such foundlings might be claimed, often to be brought up as slaves or prostitutes. But more often the babies perished.27 Philo of Alexandria described how “all the beasts that feed upon human flesh visit the spot and feast unhindered on the infants.”28 Again, Gibbon did not approve29—but neither did he amend his laudatory assessment of the city. Other evaluators, of course, might be less lenient toward these societal blemishes.
But we need not try to adjudicate between Gibbon’s extravagantly positive assessment and the bleaker depictions by critics like Juvenal. Our policy here, and throughout, will be to take a sympathetic view: we come to praise Rome, not to bury it. Classical Rome, like modern Rome—or modern New York or London or Paris—had the stuff to support both favorable and less favorable appraisals; it all depends on what we choose to look at or, conversely, to excuse or ignore. Our immediate purpose here is to understand what it was in that world that could elicit the Enlightenment historian’s effusive judgment. And we see that by focusing on selected classes and aspects of the period, we can find material to support that assessment. For the “favourites of fortune,” it seems to have been a pleasant time to be alive.
The Majesty of the City
The foregoing catalogue of material comforts and carnal indulgences has been seriously misleading, though, and it has in fact understated Rome’s grandeur if it has left the impression that your life as an affluent Roman would have been entirely given over to self-gratification. On the contrary, you would have felt an acute sense of your relation and responsibilities to your city, to the public, and to the emperors (to whom you would have offered sacrifices, as deities). And you would have taken a magnanimous pride in being a citizen of Rome—the stern but benevolent master of the world.
Of Rome. The almost mystical name reached to both the city and the empire, and it embraced powerful traditions and associations not only of military conquest but also of exemplary civic achievement.
Thus, in walking to the chariot races or the theater or the baths, you would have passed some of the magnificent public buildings and monuments whose ruined remains, a millennium and a half later—or, to be precise, on October 15, 176430—would inspire Gibbon to undertake his epic historical project. These imposing edifices had been upgraded under the emperors; the founding emperor, Augustus, boasted that he had inherited a city made of brick and transformed it into a city of marble,31 and later emperors built monuments, temples, baths, and of course the spectacular Flavian Amphitheater, or Colosseum. Gibbon himself was profoundly moved by the remains of these buildings and monuments; he was impressed also that most of them were erected at private expense for public use.32 The buildings were thus elegantly tangible evidence of a public spiritedness—or of “civic virtue,” as scholars say—that has been the envy of later generations into the present.
But spectacular buildings were only one substantial manifestation of a rich public life—a form of life that contrasts dramatically with the sort of self-regarding, inwardly turned “bowling alone” culture sometimes discerned in the contemporary world.33 The fact is, as a modern historian observes, “it was not easy to be a recluse in an ancient town. Public life was conducted in specific locations, much of it out of doors in a particular area of the city (the agora, flanked by public buildings, temples, and the senate-house).” This public character was manifest in “explosions of colour, pageantry, and popular demonstrations that mark ancient games and entertainments” (although also in “ritualized violence, . . . disorder and rioting in the cities”).34 Nor was this public life limited to the capital city; it was diffused through numerous urban centers (which Gibbon enthusiastically inventoried) and spread throughout the empire from Syria to northern Africa to Britain, all connected by thousands of miles of roads built solidly enough to survive for centuries after the empire itself had collapsed.35
To be sure, the roads had initially been constructed to permit the rapid deployment of the legions, and they thus remind us that the far-flung lands that constituted the empire had been conquered by force of arms—mostly in the latter centuries of the Roman republic before Rome had made the transition to an empire under Augustus. But this fact need not darken our appreciation of the golden age. That is because Roman rule was not oppressive, but rather beneficent; it was a means by which the blessings of Roman law and civilization had been bestowed on less fortunate peoples. Or so Gibbon insisted. “All the . . . provinces of the empire,” he declared, “were embellished by the same liberal spirit of public magnificence, and were filled with amphitheatres, theatres, temples, porticos, triumphal arches, baths, and aqueducts, all variously conducive to the health, the devotion, and the pleasures of the meanest citizen.”36
Consequently, “the tranquil and prosperous state of the empire was warmly felt, and honestly confessed, by the provincials as well as the Romans.”37 (The Jews, whom Gibbon regarded with scarcely disguised contempt38—and whose revolts in AD 66, 115, and 130 were savagely crushed by the legions,39 with Gibbon’s hearty post hoc approbation40—perhaps constituted an exception?) As support for this sanguine assessment, Gibbon quoted the elder Pliny:
They [i.e., the provincials] acknowledged that the true principles of social life, laws, agriculture, and science, which had been first invented by the wisdom of Athens, were now firmly established by the power of Rome, under whose auspicious influence, the fiercest barbarians were united by an equal government and common language. They affirm, that with the improvement of arts, the human species was visibly multiplied. They celebrate the increasing splendour of the cities, the beautiful face of the country, cultivated and adorned like an immense garden; and the long festival of peace, which was enjoyed by so many nations, forgetful of their ancient animosities, and delivered from the apprehensions of future danger.
Acknowledging that suspicions might be aroused by “the air of rhetoric and declamation” evident in Pliny’s effusion, Gibbon maintained that nonetheless “the substance . . . is perfectly agreeable to historic truth.”41
The “Image of Liberty”
In fact, the process of subjugation had extended not only to those foreign peoples who so “warmly felt” and appreciated Roman rule (as Gibbon supposed), but also to the original Romans themselves. By the time of the Antonine emperors, the republic, which had endured for almost five centuries from the expulsion of the Tarquins until the consolidation of power by Octavius (soon to be renamed Augustus), was only a distant memory, having long since been displaced by the autocracy of empire. True, the outward forms of the ancient republican constitution had been preserved. But these were a mere facade—a camouflage for the largely unconstrained power of the emperors. Thus, what Romans enjoyed in the golden age was not actually democratic liberty but rather, as Gibbon delicately put it, the “image of liberty.”42
Gibbon himself was candid about the Romans’ loss of self-governance, and he recounted how this loss had been incurred. For half a millennium after banishing the kings in the sixth century BC, the Romans had carefully guarded their rights of self-rule through a government composed of various assemblies, of which the Senate was the most central, and of officials elected by the citizens. The most important of these officials were the two consuls and the ten tribunes, who represented the common citizens. One-year terms served or at least sought to keep these officials from accumulating significant personal power. This system of governance had evolved and functioned over a period of centuries, and it sustained Rome in the conquest first of Italy, then (in the Punic Wars) of Carthage, then of the larger Mediterranean region.
In the first century BC, however, Rome had been wracked by a succession of savage civil wars: the soldiers of Sulla fought those of Marius, the legions loyal to Julius Caesar engaged those commanded by Pompey, and the armies and navies of Octavius battled and eventually defeated those of Mark Antony. Under Sulla and again under Antony and Octavius, proscriptions had been issued authorizing the slaughter of large numbers of leading citizens. Among many others, a fleeing Cicero had been captured and executed under the latter proscription; his head, hands, and eloquent tongue had been cut off and nailed to the rostra in the Roman forum—and, according to one report, spat upon and stabbed repeatedly with hairpins by Antony’s wife Fulvia.43 (To his credit, perhaps, Augustus, formerly known as Octavius, later privately praised Cicero to a grandson as “a learned man and a lover of his country.”)44
After defeating Antony at Actium in 31 BC, Octavius managed a skillfully orchestrated ceremony in which he submitted his resignation to the Senate but was then prevailed upon to accept ten-year (renewable, and renewed) appointments to a number of offices, including imperator (essentially commander in chief of the legions), proconsul, and tribune. It was then that Octavius was given his new, more majestic name. Soon thereafter were added the titles of supreme pontiff and censor; elevation to the even loftier position of god did not officially come until after Augustus’s death. Gibbon explained that the various governmental offices, especially those of consul and tribune, had constituted a sort of separation of powers that constrained governmental authority. Once those offices were united in a single man, the holder’s power became practically irresistible.45
The same arrangements were continued with Augustus’s successors. The result, Gibbon explained, was “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth. The masters of the Roman world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed their irresistible strength, and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed” (1:93).
So, should this loss of freedom count against Gibbon’s glowing assessment of the period as a golden age? The eccentric, incorruptible Cato the Younger would surely have thought so; he had famously fallen on his sword and then pulled out his own bowels rather than submit to the impending dictatorship of Octavius’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar. Gibbon’s own response to the question of liberty was more nuanced. He acknowledged that under Augustus and his immediate successors, the loss of liberty “rendered [the Romans’] condition more completely wretched than that of the victims of tyranny in any other age or country” (1:104). But that wretchedness resulted from two contingent factors. First, the subjects of the early empire felt the loss of democratic freedom more acutely because “they for a long while preserved the sentiments, or at least the ideas, of their freeborn ancestors” (1:105). Second, Rome in that period had the misfortune of being ruled by a series of spectacularly bad emperors: “the dark unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, and the timid inhuman Domitian” (1:104).
By the time of Trajan, by contrast, early in the second century, self-governance was little more than a distant memory, so its absence was no longer resented; the “image of liberty”—or the outward trappings of constitutionalism—was sufficient. Moreover, Romans in this period had the good fortune of being governed by rulers of “virtue and wisdom” (1:103). Indeed, the Antonine era was “possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government” (1:102). In the hands of such enlightened rulers, “absolute power” was a beneficent force; “virtue and wisdom” could rule without the tedious encumbrances of assemblies and elections.
To be sure, restoration of the republic might still have been desirable “had the Romans of their day been capable of enjoying a rational freedom” (1:103), but, alas, they lacked such capacity. In fact, echoing a contention of one of his favorite modern authors, Montesquieu46—a contention to which James Madison famously responded in Federalist 10—Gibbon ventured that self-governance might be possible in a small republic but was not feasible for “an unwieldy multitude” (History of the Decline, 1:61).
In addition, it would be unduly harsh to say that the “image of liberty” was nothing more than a sham. True, Romans no longer governed themselves as a people, or as a polity. But they did receive the blessings of Roman law (1:64). And they enjoyed almost complete freedom in matters of religion. Or so Gibbon thought (1:56–61); we will say more on that subject in due course.
Gibbon recognized that a good life wholly dependent on enlightened absolutism was precarious. A wise and benevolent ruler might be followed by an unmoored and wicked one. And in fact, one was: the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius was succeeded by his depraved son Commodus (1:108–11), thus bringing the golden age to an end. So the blessed prosperity of the Antonine age was not destined to endure. Still, it was glorious while it lasted.
“The Most Religious People in the World”
Thus far, in describing Gibbon’s golden age, we have mentioned religion only obliquely (as in noting the god Priapus—he of the prodigious phallus—or the deification of the emperors). The deferral has been deliberate; after all, it was not Roman religion that led a skeptical and enlightened modern like Gibbon to regard the world under the Antonine emperors with such extravagant approval. (As a young man, Gibbon had converted to but then repudiated Catholicism; his contempt in his maturity for religion, or “superstition,” was only thinly veiled, both in his historical and in his autobiographical writings.) Nor, we might think, was religion central to the life we have been describing—to the life of opulence, culture, public entertainment (such as the gladiatorial contests), military conquest, and civic commitment. Maybe the Romans also had religion, but that was incidental.
If we think this, though, we will be mistaken. Religion was not merely present in the Roman world, not merely important; it was essential, and indeed inseparable from the various forms of flourishing we have been appreciating.
Thus, Polybius, the Greek historian who as a youth had been taken as a captive to Rome, and who later accompanied the distinguished military commander Scipio Aemilianius in the campaign that resulted in the destruction of Carthage, wrote a history addressed to a fundamental and fascinating question: How had Rome risen in such a relatively short time from a sleepy provincial town to become the colossal conqueror and master of the Western world? Polybius’s history pondered the question at length, exploring various dimensions of Rome’s rise to dominance. In the course of these reflections, he called attention to one crucial but (to us) surprising factor: the Romans were religiously superior to their neighbors. Thus, “the sphere in which the Roman commonwealth seems to me to show its superiority most decisively is in that of religious belief.”47
Polybius’s opinion was hardly idiosyncratic. When the Romans received an envoy from the Greek city of Teos, they sent an introductory message declaring that “we [Romans] have totally and consistently held reverence toward the gods as of the highest importance and the truth of this is proved by the favour we have received from them in return. We are also quite sure that our great respect for the divine has been evident to everyone.”48 In a similar vein, Cicero placed in the mouth of a central character in one of his dialogues the following assessment: “If we seek to compare our Roman ways with those of foreigners, we shall find that in other respects we merely match them or even fall below them, but that in religion, that is, in the worship of the gods, we are much superior.”49
The historian J. A. North thus observes that “both the Romans themselves and the Greeks who came to observe them in the later Republican period regarded the Romans as the most religious people in the world.”50
The Religion of the City
This interpretation may seem surprising or incongruous to modern observers, because in most respects (as the foregoing description reflects) the Romans come across as supremely, exquisitely worldly. But are “religious” and “worldly” necessarily incompatible? We might suppose they are—almost by definition. But are we imposing a more modern and inapt conception of “religion” on the Romans? As we will see, far from being contraries, “religious” and “worldly” were in the ancient world nicely integrated and mutually reinforcing. And the revolution by which these terms came to be divorced and even antagonistic to each other—a revolution effected, primarily, by Christianity—has been and continues to be a powerful (and divisive, and much-resented) feature of our modern world.
So we need to take a closer look at Roman religion and its integral connection to the city. In fact, Rome and Roman religion were inseparably bound together from the very beginning, at least in the official accounts. Thus, in the national epic by the poet Virgil, Rome’s legendary ancestor Aeneas movingly recounts the events of the horrific night in which his native city of Troy was destroyed by Ulysses’s wily Greeks, smuggled into the city in the infamous Trojan horse. Aeneas tells how, in desperate fury, he recklessly flung himself against the invaders and yearned for vengeance on Helen, the exquisite instigator of the tragedy, but he was reproved by his divine mother, Venus. “Think,” she commanded. “It’s not that beauty, Helen, you should hate, / not even Paris, the man that you should blame, no. / It’s the gods, the ruthless gods who are tearing down the wealth of Troy.”51
And why had the gods dealt so harshly with his city? Homer had conjectured that the gods brought about the fall of Troy mostly for poetic purposes, “weaving ruin there / so it should make a song for men to come!”52 Virgil, by contrast, explained that the gods had a loftier, less purely lyrical aim in view. Thus, when Aeneas desperately rushes back into the burning city in search of his wife Creusa, who had fallen behind in the family’s frantic flight, he is instead greeted only by Creusa’s ghost, who offers the consolation that “it’s not without / the will of the gods these things have come to pass”; but the specter goes on to explain that the gods’ design is for Aeneas to cross the seas and found a new kingdom in a distant land “where Lydian Tiber / flows with its smooth march through rich and loamy fields, / a land of hardy people.”53
In short, the gods had decreed that Troy must fall so that Rome might rise. Similarly, Rome grew from a humble beleaguered town to a world empire with the help of the gods, which was a reward for the Romans’ extraordinary piety. According to the historian Livy, writing in the Augustan period, one of Romulus’s first acts, after founding the city and defeating a consortium of enemies, was to erect a temple to Jupiter.54 Later, faced with imminent destruction by the Sabines (whose daughters the Romans had abducted), Romulus desperately appealed to Jupiter again, once again promising a temple, and his troops promptly rallied, “obey[ing] what they believed to be the voice from heaven.”55
Upon Romulus’s somewhat mysterious death, the story came to be that he had been carried up to heaven as a deity (although Livy notes “a few dissentients who secretly maintained that the king had been torn to pieces by the senators”).56 His regal successor, Numa Pompilius, selected with the approval of the augur, was renowned for having established and regularized the religious rites and priesthoods.57 Among the subsequent kings, as Livy retells the stories, some were more and others less pious; overall, though, the role of the gods in Rome’s rise was pervasive, and their favor persisted in the republican period. But in the century of political chaos and violence that brought the republic to an end, the rites and temples may have been neglected, and many attributed Rome’s troubles to such neglect.58 Upon his accession to power, therefore, one of Augustus’s political priorities was to restore the temples, to erect new ones, and to reinvigorate the worship of the gods.59
Of the gods, in the plural. The matter will turn out to be more complex, but at least on its face Roman religion sponsored hundreds and even thousands of gods. A character in a Ciceronian dialogue complains that “the number of gods is beyond counting.”60 So there were the Olympian deities—aegis-bearing Zeus, Hermes the Wayfinder, clubfooted Hephaistos, Poseidon the Earthshaker, and company—endowed now with Latin names: Jupiter, Mercury, Vulcan, Neptune, and so forth. There were numerous exotic gods imported from foreign lands like Egypt, Syria, and Persia; Isis, Serapis, and Cybele (the Mater Magna) were especially popular. Then there were the nature gods: sun, moon, stars, the various gods of rivers, woods, and fields. Also the household or family gods—the lares and penates. And of course, the divine emperors: except for a few who declined the honor (like Tiberius) or whose wickedness was especially egregious (like Nero), emperors were typically, upon their deaths, elevated to divine status and favored with cults and shrines.61 Expiring, the emperor Vespasian sighed: “Oh dear. I think I’m becoming a god.”62
In addition, there was a whole host of deities personifying what would seem to be human qualities (Felicity, Faith, Hope) or contingencies of life—Ops (abundance), Salus (physical and moral welfare), Fortuna. Or, as a Ciceronian dialogue puts it, mere “concepts” (Virtue, Honor, Safety).63 Writing in the early fifth century, as Christianity was displacing overt paganism, Augustine would mockingly report that it took a whole field crew of gods just to raise an ear of corn—one (Proserpine) to germinate the seed, another (Seia) to tend the seed while under the ground, another (Segetia) to nurture the stalk once sprouted, still another (Tutilina) to keep the stalk safe, with Nodotus to protect the plant’s stems and Voluntina, Patelana, Hostilina, Flora, Lacturnus, Matuta, and Runcina to superintend different aspects and phases of the ripening ear of corn.64
This sprawling pantheon provided poets with the characters and materials to create the assortment of captivating and fantastic stories that students of literature today continue to study, and that typically go under the heading of “Greek and Roman mythology.” Homer’s poems were of course a leading source of these stories, but they were fetchingly related for Romans of the Augustan period in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. While regarding the stories as rank superstition, Gibbon nonetheless delighted in this literature, and read and reread it, both as a boy and as a mature adult.65
The crowds of gods had their own affairs to attend to, and they were for the most part not especially concerned about the mundane doings of mortals. And yet the gods did have the power either to bless or to blight, to help or to hinder, so it was essential to maintain good relations with them. The Romans thus devoted massive resources to honoring the gods and retaining their favor; it was in this sense that the Romans deemed themselves religiously superior to all other nations.
One essential component of this propitiatory investment was the regular ritual sacrifice of animals—of bulls, goats, sheep, pigs. In his early reign, before he became unhinged, Caligula sacrificed over 160,000 animals in less than three months’ time—a display of piety publicly regarded as “splendid,” as the historian Suetonius observed.66 Sacrificial ceremonies were performed with rigorous exactitude; any deviation from the proper language and form would make the sacrifice unacceptable to the deity being addressed.67 An emperor himself might on occasion recite the prayers and preside over the ceremony in which he and his attendants would anoint the sacrificial animal and then stun it with an axe blow before slitting its throat, collecting its blood, and carving up its body.68
Unlike a modern church service, a sacrifice was not merely a sober liturgy or a ponderous homily but also a feast, typically involving heavy eating and even heavier drinking by the devotees.69 There were sights and smells to stimulate and assault the senses. Ramsay MacMullen quotes an ancient observer who reported that “the priest himself . . . stands there all bloody and like an ogre carves and pulls out entrails and extracts the heart and pours the blood about the altar.”70 The religious festivities spilled over beyond temple precincts into noisy and colorful processions that encircled and enthralled Roman cities and towns. The worship of the imported deities Atargatis, Isis, and Cybele, MacMullen observes, “made use of inspired, mad dancing and produced a great impression on observers and was also easily and often seen, since its practitioners wandered about in public in search of an audience. To the sound of rattles, tambours, and shrill pipes, with their heads tipped back or rolling wildly on their shoulders, accompanied by their own howls and yells, they whirled about and worked themselves into a state of frenzy.”71
The stories about the gods were also regularly acted out, through plays and ballets, in theaters built to seat thousands of spectators. These were not stodgy performances; they were, as Robin Lane Fox remarks, “enormous fun.”72
MacMullen explains that “the entire range of musical instruments . . . was called into the service of the gods in one cult or another, along with every conceivable style of dance and song, theatrical show, prose hymn, lecture or tractate philosophizing, popularizing, edifying, and so forth.”73 To a more prudish eye, in fact, the theatrical performances to the gods were so lascivious, so lewd, as to amount to a form of thinly sacralized pornography. That at least was Augustine’s mature view74 (although by his own account he had delighted in going to the theater as a younger man).75
Another vital element of the civic religion was divination, or the taking of the auspices, by which leaders sought to determine the will of the gods with respect to pending military or political decisions. The entrails of animals or birds were carefully scrutinized, and the portents or “prodigies” (such as lightning strikes, a deformed child at birth, or a mole with teeth on it)76 were studied, in quest of clues to the divine agenda. Livy relates the story of an early and skeptical king, Tarquin, who sought “to ridicule the whole business of omens” by ordering an augur, Attius Navius, to say whether what the king was privately thinking at the moment was actually possible. The augur consulted the birds and then answered in the affirmative, upon which the king triumphantly declared that what he had been wondering was whether the augur could cut a whetstone in half with a razor. And then, Livy recounts, “Believe it or not: without a moment’s delay Navius did it.”77 A statue was erected in honor of the feat, and Livy observes that “whatever we may think of this story, the fact remains that the importance attached to augury and the augural priesthood increased to such an extent that to take the auspices was henceforward an essential preliminary to any serious undertaking in peace or in war: not only army parades or popular assemblies, but matters of vital concern to the commonwealth were postponed, if the birds refused their assent.”78
When Rome encountered more serious difficulties, so that deeper counsels were needed, a different guild of priests pored over the cryptic Sibylline texts (which in the murky past had been delivered to King Numa by a mysterious old crone).79 Or unusual rites might be attempted—burying a few foreigners alive, for example.80
The business for which the gods’ help was sought emphatically included military affairs. A battle was not fought without consulting the sacred chickens: if the chickens ate the pellets scattered for them, good fortune awaited, but if they declined, defeat loomed. One impatient general, Publius Claudius, who during the first war with Carthage had rashly chosen to disrespect a flock of uncooperative chickens—he had them drowned, commenting in exasperation that since they refused to eat, they could instead drink—was duly paid with military disaster.81 And upon approaching an enemy city, the Romans performed a ritual, called evocatio, calculated to lure the city’s gods over to the Roman side with promises of superior cultic worship.82
The ritual sacrifices and the auspices were conducted by men who were at once high political officials and members of one or another public priesthood. Thus, the political leaders of the Roman state—the consuls, the prefects, later the emperors—simultaneously served as officials within the four major public priesthoods, with the emperor himself filling the role of head pontiff, or pontifex maximus.
The Romans’ public religiosity was conspicuously manifest in their architecture. The capital city was rife with elegant temples dedicated to the various deities; as you walked from your domus to the baths or the games, you would surely have passed by any number of them. The same was true for other cities in the empire. Edward Watts illustrates the pervasiveness of these religious structures with the example of Alexandria in the later empire. A fourth-century catalogue, he notes, “lists almost 2,500 temples in the city, nearly one for every twenty houses.”83 In one sense, though, this estimate of one temple for every twenty houses is a gross understatement: the actual ratio was more like one to one. That is because every house was in a sense a minitemple containing its own shrine dedicated to the household gods: the lares and penates.84 In A World Full of Gods, his imaginative portrayal of the Roman world, Cambridge historian Keith Hopkins has his fictional time travelers report back: “There were temples and Gods, and humans praying to them, all over the place: at the entrance to the town, at the entrance to the Forum; there were altars at crossroads, Gods in niches as you went along, with passersby just casually blowing a kiss with their hands to the statue of a God set in a wall. And of course, here in the Forum, the ceremonial center of the town, there were temples, altars, Gods, heroes just about everywhere we looked. . . . Our end of the square was filled by the grand Temple to Jupiter, with Vesuvius magnificently snowcapped behind. And all the rest of the buildings looked as though they could be temples too.”85
Religion was pervasive not only spatially but also temporally. The calendar was structured around the major religious festivals—the Lupercalia, Parlia, Robigalia, Saturnalia, and various others—and was administered by the priestly college of pontiffs.86 All in all, 177 days of the year were designated as holidays or festivals, in honor of thirty-three different gods or goddesses.87
But then, what about the images of worldliness we noted earlier—the gladiatorial games and chariot races? And the extravagant sexuality? We have already noted how military and political activities were infused with religion. The theatrical performances, likewise, were dedicated to the gods.88 And odd though it may seem to moderns, the games were religious exercises as well; before the gladiators and the wild animals were brought out and cheered on as they slaughtered each other, the games were dedicated to the honor of the gods.89 In hard times, when Roman leaders felt an urgent need for the gods’ assistance, they would sometimes sponsor a special set of games ordained to the gods.90 So for all their fatal ferocity, these were essentially religious rites.
Perhaps surprisingly, a similar description could fit the city’s rampant sexuality—the brothels and the sex slaves and the ubiquitous phalluses. We will say more on that subject momentarily.
In sum, public or civic religion was pervasive in the Roman world. City and religion were thoroughly integrated, coextensive, inseparable. “There was a religious aspect to every communal action,” the historian John Scheid explains, “and a communal aspect to every religious action.”91
Rome’s pervasive and unembarrassed sexuality likewise had both a religious and a civic dimension. In the Roman Empire, sexual morality reflected two broad premises. First, sexual fulfillment is not only natural and pleasurable and presumptively acceptable; it is also a kind of ecstatic religious performance. But, second, sexual behavior and fulfillment are constrained by the city—or by the demands of social and political life.
The Divine Imperative. The historian Kyle Harper’s recent study shows how these premises informed the attitudes and economy of the empire. “Male sexual energy was a definite quantity that had to be expended, somewhere,” Harper explains;92 consequently, “any hard restrictions on male sexual exertion in the years after puberty were considered implausible.”93 Sex provided sensual gratification, of course: the physician-philosopher Galen observed with clinical detachment that “a very great pleasure is coupled with the exercise of the generative parts, and a raging desire precedes their use.”94 Indeed, abstinence was deemed unhealthy (except by a few Stoics):95 it could lead to nausea, fever, and poor digestion.96 But sexual fulfillment was not merely a physical imperative, it was also a sort of religious performance or duty. “The figure of Eros himself, symbol of joy and life, was unfailingly popular,” Harper observes, and “sexual passion was an immanent divine force”97—the “mysterious, indwelling presence of the gods.”98 In a similar vein, Kathy Gaca explains that “in antiquity, sexual arousal, activity, and reproduction were in part immanent divine powers, not simply human forms of energy.”99
In the second century rom-com novel Leucippe and Clitophon, for example, the protagonist, Clitophon, reports that his passions were “inflamed” by a song about Apollo’s attempted conquest of the lovely nymph Daphne, and he explains that “even if you school yourself into self-control, an example incites you to imitate it, especially when that example is a divine one; in which case, any shame that you feel at your moral errors becomes an outspoken affront to the station of a higher being.”100 Later, when Clitophon is feeling apprehensive about his project to seduce the lovely Leucippe, his servant Satyrus reproves and encourages him. “[The god] Eros admits of no feebleness,” Satyrus urges. “You observe the military nature of his accoutrements, the bow, the quiver, the missiles, the flame: all manly things, and crammed with courage. And you are cowardly and timorous with a god such as that inside you?” The worldly-wise servant thus urges his wavering master to go forth and seduce “as a soldier in the service of a manly god.”101
But it was not only the male characters for whom sexual desire enjoyed a divine imprimatur. Harper explains that more generally, and especially through the female character Leucippe, the author Achilles Tatius conveys “an ambitious vision of conjugal eros, in which the most profound stirrings of the body not only connected man with the divine forces that replenished the earth but also offered personal transcendence.”102 More generally, Roman novels convey a picture of “a world keenly knit by the gods so that mankind might find in erotic fulfillment nothing short of salvation.”103
Peter Brown expresses the characteristic attitude in poetic language that might have earned the admiration of the Romans themselves:
The men we meet in the second century still belonged to the rustling universe of late classical polytheism. They knew that they had been knit, by the cunning of the gods, to the animal world. They felt pulsing in their own bodies the same fiery spirit that covered the hills every year with newborn lambs and that ripened the crops, in seasonal love-play, as the spring winds embraced the fertile ears. Above them, the same fire glowed in the twinkling stars. Their bodies, and their sexual drives, shared directly in the unshakable perpetuity of an immense universe through which the gods played exuberantly.104
This sacralization of sexuality helps explain the ubiquity of erotic imagery—paintings, mosaics, statues—in Roman culture. The explicit imagery within homes—on lampshades, in wall frescoes—has already been mentioned.105 Similar depictions adorned the public spaces. Summarizing the findings of archeological research, Keith Hopkins has his fictional time traveler Martha report:
Here in real Pompeii, in the only changing rooms of these upscale baths, used by women, men, and children, explicit pictures of sexual couplings confront you whether you like it or not. In [one depiction] the man was having the woman from behind, but [another] showed the woman on top, and [another] was a picture of a woman fellating a man, interrupted in his reading. These changing rooms were clearly aiming at an educated clientele. Then to balance matters, there was cunnilingus by a man. . . . The next picture was more conventional, except that the woman had one leg athletically over the man’s shoulder.
After all that, the sexual combinations became rather more complicated. . . . Anyhow the next two pictures showed a trio of two men and a woman, and then a quartet of two men and two women in a homosexual and heterosexual chain.106
The stimulation of visual art was reinforced by erotic literature and theatrical performances107—including, during the spring Floralia celebration, live inspirational sex shows.108 Hopkins’s time travelers report that “one local bar had a bronze bell hanging over the counter shaped as a hunchback pygmy, with several large penises and five bells. To get service, you just yanked on one of the penises. We saw bells like this all over Pompeii, and in grand houses too. Some quite artistically made.”109 Kyle Harper explains that “what modern cultures might regard as obscene or pornographic was an ordinary part of bourgeois and elite domesticity.”110
For the most part, Roman culture was indifferent to whether sexual fulfillment was achieved with a same-sex or opposite-sex partner.111 Sex with boys at the right stage of maturity was looked on with favor, and celebrated in romantic poetry;112 following Homer, boys were deemed most alluring in early adolescence, when the first soft hair appeared on their cheeks.113 Some writers regarded pederasty as more pure and virtuous than sex with women: that was because the “ ‘form, complexion, and image of the boy’s beauty’ was . . . a powerful reminder, sent by the gods, of heavenly beauty, a sensible impression of the incorruptible reality.”114 The emperor Hadrian, though married, was devoted to his young lover Antinous, who accompanied the emperor on his many travels; after Antinous’s tragic death, perhaps by drowning (or perhaps by suicide, or even in a religious sacrifice), Hadrian had his beloved elevated to the status of a god and also named a city after him.115
One major qualification on this acceptance of pederasty and homosexual conduct, however, was that Roman sexuality was subject to an ethic of manliness—of machismo, if you like—and this ethic put limits on the kind of sexual conduct that a man could honorably engage in. More specifically, men were expected to play the penetrative or insertive role.116 Conversely, “effeminate” men were reviled; it was disgraceful to be the passive partner in sexual relations, or to fulfill the function ascribed to a woman.117 Sarah Ruden reports that “to keep it unmistakable that he had no sympathy with passive homosexuals, a man would tout his attacks on vulnerable young males.”118
Another corollary of manliness was the imperative of self-mastery. Excessive sexual indulgence was thought to be enervating and, like passive homosexuality, effeminate.119 So sexual passions were to be gratified, certainly, but a man who allowed his sexual passions to gain control of him was to that extent less than virtuous, just as a man who could not control any other passion was worthy of criticism.
Civic Constraints. But if the ideal of manliness both encouraged and constrained sexual gratification, probably the most important constraints came from the demands of social life. In the Roman Empire, society was patriarchal and hierarchical.120 And the Romans were constantly concerned, even obsessed, with the necessity of reproduction121—of reproduction within the patriarchal family. Hence the imperative—and the function—of marriage. It might be hoped that marriage would lead to love, but this was a luxury; the institution’s understood purpose was “the reproduction of legitimate offspring.”122 This concern with reproduction was not merely neurotic, but was grounded in grim demographic realities. Peter Brown points out that the average life expectancy was less than twenty-five, and only four out of a hundred men, and fewer women, lived to age fifty.123 Given the high mortality rate, “for civic elites of the second century . . . wholehearted commitment to sex and marriage was a call to arms against death, in a landscape that always appears to contemporaries (overshadowed by so many tombs of children and young wives) to be trembling on the brink of demographic collapse.”124
The imperative of reproduction within the patriarchal family sponsored different roles for men (who worked, warred, and participated in politics and civic life) and for women (who tended to the household), and these different roles included radically different sexual standards for men and women. Men were expected to have sexual adventures before marriage—which typically occurred in their midtwenties—and to have ample opportunities for sexual expression thereafter.125 By contrast, the sexual behavior of women—or at least of respectable women—was governed by an ideal of chastity. This ideal dictated virginity until marriage—an event that occurred as young as age twelve but typically in the midteens, and that was effectively mandatory for respectable women—and complete fidelity thereafter.126 The norm against adultery was enforced by convention, by law (the so-called lex Iulia, titled after Augustus’s daughter Julia, whose profligate conduct prompted her imperial father to promulgate the prohibition),127 and, perhaps most effectively, by self-help. To have relations with another man’s wife was tantamount to despoiling his property. At least in Roman literature, therefore, adulterers were subject to being killed, beaten, castrated, or raped at the election of the dishonored husband.128 Upon assuming the office of consul during the reign of Septimius Severus, Dio Chrysostom found that there were two thousand trials for adultery in progress;129 the number suggests that the prohibition was not a dead letter but also that violations were not rare.
Beyond its prohibition of actual adultery, Roman culture prescribed feminine modesty. “The Roman matron,” Harper explains, “should dress only so nice as to avoid uncleanness, she should always be chaperoned in public, she should walk with her eyes down and risk rudeness rather than immodesty in her greetings, and she should blush when addressed.”130 But these norms of chastity and modesty were not simply imposed on women by men; at least to outward appearances, they were embraced by women and promoted “with verve.” “Chastity was a badge of honor, separating the Roman matron from the slaves whose bodies she ostentatiously controlled.”131
The Political Economy of Sexuality. This last observation begins to answer a question that the preceding discussion must have provoked: If men were expected to indulge their sexual desires and passions (albeit not to excess, and only in the penetrative, not the passive, role), and if women were enjoined to virginity before marriage and to a chaste fidelity afterward, then who were the men supposed to have sex with (beyond, of course, their wives, and the limited demographic of comely adolescent boys)? The answer, basically, was: with prostitutes and slaves.
Thus, in Roman cities, brothels dotted the cityscape like Starbucks or Taco Bells in a modern American city.132 The historian Dio Chrysostom complained that brothels “are apparent everywhere in the city—at the governor’s porch, in the marketplaces, by the buildings both civil and religious, right in the middle of what ought to be most revered.”133 The emperor Caligula sponsored an imperial brothel, “stocked it with married women and freeborn boys” (as Suetonius observed), “and then sent his pages around the squares and public places, inviting men of all ages to come and enjoy themselves”—on credit if necessary.134 The brothels were supplemented by taverns, inns, and public baths that were well known as centers of sexual gratification.135 Prostitutes, recruited (or, perhaps more accurately, conscripted by necessity) from the poorer classes outside the norms of respectability, were “ubiquitous.”136
The other main source of sexual satisfaction was slaves, both male and female.137 Slaves were especially favored by the more aristocratic classes, who looked down on prostitution—not as immoral but as “squalid.” With their ownership of numerous slaves, fortunately, the well-off found it “unnecessary to share sexual receptacles.”138 Sex with slaves was deemed perfectly acceptable because, as one Roman author put it, “every master is held to have it in his power to use his slave as he wishes.”139
Given the culture’s elevation and pervasive stimulation of (male) sexual desire, it should not be surprising that Roman men sometimes found themselves unable to limit their gratification to the approved channels of prostitutes, slaves, consenting boys, and of course, their own wives. Though forbidden, adultery occurred; it is hard to know how frequently.140 According to the Roman historian Suetonius, the emperor Augustus, although he sternly forbade adultery and unflinchingly banished his daughter Julia for her delinquencies, regularly had affairs with the wives of Roman nobles—though more as a means of spying on potential rivals, Suetonius hastens to explain, than for lubricious reasons.141 Other emperors were notoriously less discreet, gratifying themselves in extravagant sexual orgies involving siblings, colleagues’ spouses, children and even infants, and multiple pairings.142
There also seems to have been a widespread practice of predatory sex with boys whom, because of age or social status or lack of consent, social norms deemed ineligible for such relations.143 Ruden reports that “it was . . . normal for a family of any standing to dedicate one slave to a son’s protection, especially on the otherwise unsupervised walk to and from school.”144 But safe arrival at school was no sure security; philosopher-teachers were widely suspected of taking liberties with their pupils.145
Through these various means, some deemed legitimate and some not, Roman culture contrived amply to satisfy the natural, divinely approved need for sexual gratification. Kyle Harper observes that “the Roman Empire was the most complete and most refined expression of a sexual economy that had its origins in the very birth of the classical Mediterranean city-state. If the disciplines of sexual self-knowledge were more rigorous in the high empire, the delivery of sexual pleasures was more efficient than ever.”146
Consecrating the City
As we have seen, religion was integrated into every aspect of Roman society, government, and culture (including sexuality), and it served to sustain the city that contemporary Romans and later admirers like Gibbon have regarded with admiration sometimes bordering on reverence. Nearly all Romans, educated or not, would have said or simply assumed that religion—the religion of the gods—was essential to Rome and Roman life.
This assumption will likely seem quite contrary to modern sensibilities, accustomed as we are to a “separation of church and state.” And so we might ask, and quickly review: Why did Roman society need religion? The question is crucial because it will bear importantly on the conflict between paganism and Christianity, to be discussed in later chapters.
At the crudest level, religion was deemed necessary because it helped keep the masses—and perhaps the elites as well—in line. A cynic might imagine that this was religion’s principal use, that (as Cicero stated the position, without endorsing it) “belief in the immortal gods was a total invention of the sages in the interests of the state, so that those who could not be impelled by reason should be constrained by religious awe to a sense of duty.”147 In a similar vein, in asserting the importance of religion to Rome, the historian Polybius emphasized its function in inducing people to comply with their duties and reducing official corruption.148
For devout Romans, however, religion was essential to society and state in a more important way. In this perspective, the gods were real, and powerful, and prone to intervene for good or ill in the affairs of mortals. The pagan epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, are full of episodes showing how imperative it was to cultivate the favor of the gods and, conversely, how disastrous to provoke the gods’ ire. Hence the vital importance of performing the rituals and sacrifices and auguries regularly and exactly. The Odyssey relates, for instance, how in his return from the Trojan wars, Menelaus sacrificed to the gods but was stingy in the quantity of animals offered up. He was accordingly blown off course and delayed by years; and he would have been destroyed altogether had he not charmed a nymph daughter of Proteus into telling him how he could stealthily seize her father and force him to grant a special favor.149 And we have already seen how a leader who disregarded the guidance of the gods—Publius Claudius, for example, the ill-fated general who disrespected the sacred chickens—could bring disaster upon himself and those under his command.
But religion was valuable for reasons that went beyond rendering the people submissive and law-abiding, and even beyond the imperative of enlisting the gods’ aid in battles and political decisions. Cicero suggested, more broadly, that the worship of the gods helped maintain the “sense of the holy”; without this, “our lives become fraught with disturbance and great chaos.”150 The gods “were not simply up in heaven,” as Oxford historian Robin Lane Fox explains, “but rather were all around—in the storm, in sickness, in battle, on the hillside, in the public spaces, in dreams, in stories.” They imparted to the world a “shining beauty and grace.”151 These themes point directly to the consecration function discussed in the previous chapter. Consecration, or literally, “association with the sacred,” prevents the world from falling into chaos and instead connects with ultimate meaning and sublimity.
This sense of beauty, and of a city that was consecrated to and by the gods, was surely essential to what gave the Roman world its splendor—a splendor perceived by contemporaries but also later by Gibbon and other like-minded observers and recollectors. True, Rome had conquered many lands, but there have been other, geographically vaster empires (think of the Mongol Empire, for instance, or the Soviet Union). Rome in the first and second centuries experienced relative peace (although the philosopher-emperor Marcus, for example, was often at the German front, fighting off the barbarians) and commercial prosperity, but there have been other civilizations that have enjoyed these benefits. The Romans inherited the cultural and literary achievements of Greece and contributed some of their own, but there have been other ages of literary and cultural fluorescence—the Renaissance, or the Elizabethan or Shakespearean age. The Romans elaborated a system of law, but other communities and states have developed legal systems, and have enjoyed considerably more political freedom than the “image of liberty”—Gibbon’s deft phrase152—which was all the Romans could claim under the empire.
And yet Gibbon perceived, as others have, something stately or majestic in the Roman world—something beautiful, even sublime—that made it stand out as distinctively blessed. And although Gibbon himself may or may not have appreciated the fact,153 the Romans themselves—Cicero, Augustus, and, later, the fourth-century pagan emperor Julian, who tried desperately to revive a by-then-ailing paganism—would have attributed this quality in large part to the Romans’ peculiar virtue. Namely, to their unrivaled reverence toward the gods.
In sum, Rome in late antiquity was somehow much more than just a relatively (and sporadically) peaceful polity with a thriving economy. It also provided, in some measure, the goods that in the previous chapter we associated with religion—meaning, sublimity, and communal connection to the sacred. A resident of Rome—an affluent citizen, but even a poorer subject—was part of a larger and glorious enterprise that had its grand narrative (one stirringly related in Virgil’s Aeneid, among other places), its connection to sublimity and the sacred (as visibly manifest in the ubiquitous temples and sacrifices and processions), and its communal consecrations of these ancient and enduring sources of meaning and sublimity.
G. K. Chesterton famously described America as a “nation with the soul of a church.”154 Chesterton’s description would have fit the Roman Empire as well. A fortiori. Indeed, Rome was, in a sense, a kind of magnificent megachurch.
It was, in short, the city of the gods.
And yet, without wanting to be impertinent, we might wonder: Did the Romans actually, well, believe in this swarming mass of disparate deities? Really, sincerely believe in them? For us, the question is inextricably connected to the subject of religion: people cannot talk seriously about a religion without asking, or at least quietly wondering: Ah, but is it actually . . . true? Would the Romans have raised the same question, or at least understood it? And if so, how would they have answered it? We will consider the matter in the next chapter.
1. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 2 vols. (London: Penguin, [1776] 1995), 1:103.
2. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:104.
3. Edgar Allan Poe, “To Helen,” in The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Signet Classics, 2008), 66.
4. Cf. Norman F. Cantor, Antiquity: From the Birth of Sumerian Civilization to the Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 28 (“Yet the Roman Empire of 150 A.D. was a glorious thing, to be long remembered as a golden age”).
5. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:102.
6. See, e.g., Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, trans. Betty Radice (London: Penguin, 1984), 174 (“According to the scale of Switzerland, I am a rich man; and I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expense, and my expense is equal to my wishes”).
7. For a nice description, see Roger Ling, “The Arts of Living,” in The Oxford History of the Classical World, ed. John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, and Oswyn Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 718. Hereafter, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
8. Gibbon, Memoirs, 15, 18.
9. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 47.
10. Cantor, Antiquity, 29.
11. The point is emphasized in Geoffrey R. Stone, Sex and the Constitution (London: Norton, 2017), 4–12.
12. These would depict “one man and one woman on a bed . . . joined in carnal embrace,” but also “same-sex pairings” and “elaborate sexual positions,” or mythical scenes—Zeus posing as a swan with Leda—or perhaps “scenes of women with horses” or “scenes of men with donkeys.” Harper, From Shame to Sin, 68.
13. See Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: The Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York: Penguin, 1999), 209.
14. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 49.
15. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 49.
16. See Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 461.
17. See Fox, The Classical World, 549 (“Pliny also had hundreds and hundreds of slaves, at least five hundred [to judge from his will] and no doubt many more”).
18. See below, 77.
19. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 26–37, 45–46.
20. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 37–45.
21. See below, 76.
22. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:80.
23. Juvenal, Satires, trans. William Gifford (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1802).
24. Fox, The Classical World, 462.
25. Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 106.
26. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 2:138.
27. See O. M. Bakke, When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005), 26–33.
28. Quoted in Bakke, When Children Became People, 112.
29. E.g., Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:494.
30. Gibbon, Memoirs, 63.
31. Fox, The Classical World, 460.
32. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:70–71.
33. See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
34. John Matthews, “Roman Life and Society,” in Boardman, Griffin, and Murray, The Oxford History of the Classical World, 748, 763–64.
35. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:75–77.
36. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:74.
37. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:82.
38. See, e.g., Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:447–49 (“A single people refused to join in the common intercourse of mankind.” “The sullen obstinacy with which they maintained their peculiar rites and unsocial manners” “in contradiction to every known principle of the human mind, that singular people seems to have yielded a stronger and more ready assent to the traditions of their remote ancestors, than to the evidence of their senses”).
39. See generally Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).
40. See Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:516 (“We are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of the legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but of humankind”).
41. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:82.
42. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:96, 103.
43. Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (New York: Random House, 2003), 319.
44. Plutarch, “The Life of Cicero,” in Loeb Classical Library edition, vol. 7, 49.5, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Cicero*.html#46.3.
45. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:91. In the next few paragraphs, page references from this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
46. Gibbon, Memoirs, 36.
47. Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (London: Penguin, 1979), 349.
48. J. A. North, Roman Religion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 76.
49. Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 2.8, p. 50.
50. North, Roman Religion, 76.
51. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 2010), 2.744–747, p. 95.
52. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 8.619–620.
53. Virgil, The Aeneid 2.963–971, pp. 101–2.
54. Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt (London: Penguin, 2002), 43.
55. Livy, Early History of Rome, 44.
56. Livy, Early History of Rome, 49.
57. Livy, Early History of Rome, 51–55.
58. See Fox, The Classical World, 427.
59. Fox, The Classical World, 427. See also Anthony Everitt, Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor (New York: Random House, 2006), 242–43.
60. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 1.84, p. 32.
61. See, generally, Valerie M. Warrior, Roman Religion: A Sourcebook (Newburyport, MA: Focus Pub.; R. Pullins, 2002), 127–38.
62. Warrior, Roman Religion, 138.
63. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 3.61, p. 129. See also John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion, trans. Janet Lloyd (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 155–57.
64. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. and ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.8, pp. 152–53.
65. Gibbon, Memoirs, 14, 35, 81.
66. Suetonius, “Gaius Caligula,” in The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (London: Penguin, 1957), 151.
67. James J. O’Donnell, Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 31.
68. For a vivid description of one such ceremony, see O’Donnell, Pagans, 28–42.
69. Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 39.
70. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 41. MacMullen explains that “the great bulk of meat (not fish or fowl) eaten in the ancient world had been butchered in temple precincts, most of which, ill-supplied with water, could not be swashed down easily, accumulated ugly piles of offal in corners and supported not only flies in clouds but stray mongrels as well” (41).
71. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 24.
72. Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (London: Penguin, 1986), 70.
73. MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire, 24.
74. E.g., Augustine, City of God 2.8–9, pp. 59–61.
75. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, ed. and trans. Albert Cook Outler, rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 2002), 3.2, p. 32 (“Stage plays also captivated me, with their sights full of the images of my own miseries: fuel for my own fires”).
76. Fox, The Classical World, 290.
77. Livy, Early History of Rome, 75–76.
78. Livy, Early History of Rome, 76. See also Cicero, “On Divination,” in Cicero on Old Age, on Friendship, on Divination, trans. W. A. Falconer, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 213, 225 (reporting that “after the expulsion of the kings, no public business was ever transacted at home or abroad without first taking the auspices”).
79. See Warrior, Roman Religion, 13, 22–23; O’Donnell, Pagans, 26, 92.
80. See Fox, The Classical World, 306.
81. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 2.7, p. 49.
82. O’Donnell, Pagans, 110.
83. Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 18–19. Nor did religion end at the city limits. Watts reports that “the Roman countryside housed an even greater array of sacred sites. These included large temple complexes, grottoes and other rustic sacred locations, and a large category of rural structures that served, in effect, as temples run by the household that controlled the land” (19).
84. Warrior, Roman Religion, 25–26.
85. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 13.
86. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 48–54; Warrior, Roman Religion, 59–69.
87. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, 24.
88. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 106–8; Warrior, Roman Religion, 115–20.
89. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 41.
90. See, e.g., Suetonius, “Divus Augustus,” in Graves, The Twelve Caesars, 54.
91. Scheid, Introduction to Roman Religion, 20. See also Fox, Pagans and Christians, 82 (describing “the gods’ role on every level of social life and their pervasive presence”).
92. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 47.
93. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 54.
94. Quoted in Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 17.
95. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 70–78.
96. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 58.
97. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 68. See also 57–58 (“Wine, like sex, was an immanent divine force, and the wash of its warm ecstasy was experienced as a communion with Dionysus”).
98. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 67.
99. See also Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 132.
100. Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, trans. Tim Whitmarsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 7–8.
101. Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, 22.
102. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 80.
103. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 21.
104. Brown, The Body and Society, 27–28.
105. See above, 54. See also Harper, From Shame to Sin, 66 (“Men, women, and children were surrounded by lush paintings of venereal acts in various stages of consummation”).
106. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 17–18.
107. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 48.
108. Sarah Ruden, Paul among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (New York: Random House, 2010), 19.
109. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 21.
110. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 66. See also Fox, The Classical World, 537: “On doorbells, lamps or doorposts there had long been images of erect penises; there had also been sexual scenes, very explicit, on the surrounds of personal hand-mirrors and so forth. . . . When we find paintings of a naked woman on top of a man in the colonnade round a central peristyle garden or numbered paintings of oral sex between men and women, including foursomes, in the changing-room of a set of public baths, we cannot explain somehow a painings to avert the ‘evil eye’ and assume good fortune. They are simply sexy.”
111. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 24, 36.
112. See Amy Richlin, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 34–44.
113. Fox, The Classical World, 41.
114. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 29–30. See also Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, 41.
115. Anthony Everitt, Hadrian and the Triumph of Rome (New York: Random House, 2009), 283–94.
116. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 36.
117. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 32–37. “The viciousness of mainstream attitudes toward passivity,” Harper explains, “is startling for anyone who approaches the ancient sources with the false anticipation that pre-Christian cultures were somehow reliably civilized toward sexual minorities” (37). For a vivid description of the revulsion felt against “effeminate” men, see Ruden, Paul among the People, 47–54.
118. Ruden, Paul among the People, 53.
119. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 56; see also Brown, The Body and Society, 18–20.
120. Brown, The Body and Society, 9 (“In the second century A.D., a young man of the privileged classes of the Roman Empire grew up looking at the world from a position of unchallenged dominance. Women, slaves, and barbarians were unalterably different from him and inferior to him”).
121. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 39–40. See also 78 (“The sexual economy of the high Roman Empire was dominated by the imperatives of social reproduction”).
122. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 62.
123. Brown, The Body and Society, 6.
124. Brown, The Body and Society, xlvi. See also xliii (“Among the Greco-Roman notables . . . the bodies of men and women were mobilized against death. They were asked to produce, in an orderly fashion, orderly children to man the walls of those bright little cities whose entrance roads were lined with tombs”).
125. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 52–70.
126. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 37–52.
127. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 38–39. For discussion of the law and how it worked in practice, see Fox, The Classical World, 433–35; Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, 215–19; Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1988), 88–90.
128. Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, 216.
129. Rousselle, Porneia, 89.
130. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 41.
131. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 45.
132. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 47.
133. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 74 (quoting Dio).
134. Suetonius, “Gaius Caligula,” 167–68.
135. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 47.
136. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 46. See also 48 (noting that “droves of poor women were forced to become prostitutes”).
137. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 26. See also 27 (“The ubiquity of slaves meant pervasive sexual availability”).
138. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 49.
139. Quoted in Brown, The Body and Society, 23.
140. Brown, The Body and Society, 42; Richlin, The Garden of Priapus, 215–19.
141. Suetonius, “Divus Augustus,” 82.
142. See, e.g., Suetonius, “Tiberius,” “Gaius Caligula,” and “Nero,” all in Graves, The Twelve Caesars, 127–28, 164–65, and 222–23, respectively.
143. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 29. See also Ruden, Paul among the People, 62–65.
144. Ruden, Paul among the People, 55.
145. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 29.
146. Harper, From Shame to Sin, 60.
147. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 1.118, p. 44.
148. Polybius, Rise of the Roman Empire, 349.
149. Homer, The Odyssey 4.277–627.
150. Cicero, Nature of the Gods 1.4, p. 4.
151. Fox, The Classical World, 50.
152. Gibbon, History of the Decline, 1:103.
153. Gibbon began the second chapter of his history with the observation that “it is not alone by the rapidity, or the extent of conquest, that we should estimate the greatness of Rome” (History of the Decline, 1:56). He then proceeded to discuss Roman law, government, and philosophy; but the first subject he addressed was Roman religion, which he affectionately portrayed as exemplifying “the mild spirit of antiquity” (1:57). And while describing the myths as “the idle tales of the poets,” he acknowledged that “the elegant mythology of Homer gave a beautiful, and almost a regular form, to the polytheism of the ancient world” (1:58).
154. G. K. Chesterton, “What I Saw in America: The Resurrection of Rome Sidelights,” in G. K. Chesterton Collected Works, vol. 21 (San Francisco: Ignatius, [1922] 1990), 45.