Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (8 page)

These cities stood side by side with the more ancient cultures conquered by the Macedonian generals, and there were untidy accommodations between the different worlds: an unstable mixture of repulsion, incomprehension and mutual exploration and exploitation. A much enriched variety of encounters in religion and culture was paired with a steep decline in political choice for the inhabitants of these
poleis.
What independence of action they experienced was no more than administering themselves and organizing taxes for their royal masters. There was a degree of sham in this Greek culture, at least as compared with the great days of Classical Athens. It may be because of this that there was a gradual closing down on the exuberant creativity which had been so prominent in Classical Greece. A strain of pessimism began to run through Hellenistic culture, redolent of Plato's pessimism about everyday things, his sense of their unreality and worthlessness.
²⁹

If philosophers could no longer hope to alter the policies of cities by influencing the thought of the people in the marketplace, and monarchs seemed impervious to the instruction of the most cultivated tutors, philosophy might as well concentrate on the inward life of the individual which no mighty ruler might tamper with. It became concerned with the proper cultivation of the self. At the most extreme, some took up the label of 'Cynic', cherishing the memory of Diogenes of Sinope and his purposefully antisocial behaviour (which had included telling Alexander the Great to step sideways out of his sunlight); others admired a contemporary of Philip and Alexander, Pyrrhon of Elis, who advised that it was best to refrain from making any judgements at all. Another contemporary, Epicurus, saw the pursuit of happiness as life's ultimate goal: that Epicurean affirmation is echoed in the American Declaration of Independence, curiously omitting the original qualification that happiness consists in the attainment of inner tranquillity. Zeno, teaching in the
Stoa
('Porch') in Athens, inspired 'Stoics' to strive to conquer their passions, and to make sure that the inevitable miseries of life did as little as possible to hurt them.

Against such an intellectual background, where the everyday world was of little account to the true idealist, curiosity expressed in practical creativity was no longer much valued. There was little follow-up to the remarkable advances seen in Classical Greece in the understanding of technology, medicine and geography. When the steam engine was invented in Alexandria about a hundred years after the birth of Jesus Christ, it remained a toy, and the ancient world failed to make the breakthrough in energy resources which occurred in England seventeen centuries later. Abundant slave labour, after all, blunted the need for any major advance in technology. Yet in the realm of ideas, philosophy and religious practice, Hellenistic civilization created a meeting place for Greek and oriental culture, which made it easy and natural for Jewish and then non-Jewish followers of Jesus Christ to take what they wanted from the ragbag of Greek thought which any moderately educated inhabitant of the Middle East would encounter in everyday conversation.

ROME AND THE COMING OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

By the time Jesus Christ was born in Palestine, the Hellenistic world was being ruled by another wave of imperial conquerors, who had come from the west, but who did little to challenge the cultural superiority of the society which they had found - quite the reverse. Their rule, unlike Alexander's, lasted for centuries, and the memory of it has haunted Christianity ever since. Rome was a city whose sense of destiny was all the greater because no one could have predicted the effect of such an insignificant place on the wider world. Strabo, the Greek historian and geographer, who died just before Jesus embarked on his public ministry, shrewdly observed that Rome's sheer lack of resources made its people acutely aware that their only assets were their energies in war and their determination to survive; the city had few natural endowments apart from timber and river transport to recommend it and, sited in the centre of the Italian peninsula, it was not even on any international trade route. It lacked any strong natural defences and, as it grew, its local agriculture would have been quite inadequate to support its population had it not acquired new territory.
³⁰

It was around the mid-eighth century BCE that Rome became a walled city with a king, rather like a
polis
in archaic Greece.
³¹
The monarchy was overthrown in 509 BCE and thereafter the Romans had such a pathological fear of the idea of kingship that no one bore the title 'King of the Romans' again until a Christian ruler from what is now Germany reinvented it a millennium and a half later, far from Rome and therefore deaf to the ancient taboo. There followed a generation of conflict between an aristocracy (the patricians) and the people (plebeians), just as in Greece. However, the result of this war was opposite to the outcome in Greek city-states like Athens or Corinth: the aristocrats won and the constitution of the Republic (
res publica
) which they developed influenced Roman forms of government down to the end of the empire. The plebeians lost whatever power they had possessed under the monarchy; there were still popular assemblies, but their role was without substance. Real power lay with two consuls, officers chosen annually from among the patricians, and with the Senate, an assembly of patricians; even here, junior senators had little say in the running of affairs. Ordinary people had influence on policy only through the popularly elected tribunes, who were honoured and sacrosanct during their year of office. Tribunes looked after the legal rights of the people, and even in the later Republic, when popular rights had dwindled still further, they still vetoed legislation proposed by the Senate.

Otherwise, the Roman Republic starkly contrasted with the development of democracy in the Athenian mould. Its unequal balance appealed greatly to aristocrats in Christian societies, once Christian societies came into existence, and we will meet several such 'Republics' (or, in an alternative English translation, 'Commonwealths') as alternatives to monarchy, in both Latin and Orthodox Christendom: Venice, Novgorod, Poland-Lithuania, the seventeenth-century England of Oliver Cromwell. The Roman Republic's difference from developed Greek city-states probably arose because of Rome's continual yearning to expand: a state more or less permanently at war either to maintain or to expand its frontiers could not afford the luxury of real democracy. Why was Rome's expansion so remarkably successful? Plenty of other states produced dramatic expansion, but survived for no more than a few generations or a couple of centuries at most. The western part of the Roman state survived for twelve hundred years, and in its eastern form the Roman Empire had a further thousand years of life after that. The answer probably lies in another contrast with Greece: the Romans had very little sense of racial exclusiveness. They gave away Roman citizenship to deserving foreigners - by deserving, they would mean those who had something to offer them in return, if only grateful collaboration. Occasionally whole areas would be granted citizenship. It was even possible for slaves to make the leap from being non-persons to being citizens, simply by a formal ceremony before a magistrate, or by provision in their owners' wills.
³²

Where this highly original view of citizenship came from is not clear; it must have evolved during the struggle for power between the patricians and the plebeians after the fall of the kings. In any case, the effect was to give an ever-widening circle of people a vested interest in the survival of Rome. That became clear in one dramatic case in the first century of the Common Era, when a Jewish tent-maker called Paul, from Tarsus, far away from Rome in Asia Minor, could proudly say that he was a Roman citizen, knowing that this status protected him against the local powers threatening him. It might have been his pride in this status of universal citizen which first suggested to Paul that the Jewish prophet who had seized his allegiance in a vision had a message for all people and not just the Jews.

The story of the Roman Republic is one of steady expansion throughout the Mediterranean. Rome must have had contact with Greeks from its earliest days, but it started casting interested and acquisitive eyes on the Greek mainland during the second century BCE. Rome's eventual conquest of Greece and the Near East, still ruled by Seleucid descendants of one of Alexander the Great's generals, was not planned: initially friendly relations gradually deteriorated until the Republic lurched into war with the Seleucid king Antiochos III from 192 to 188 BCE. As a result Rome became the master of Greece and soon the Romans extended their encirclement of the Mediterranean basin with their conquest of the Ptolemaic monarchy of Egypt. The paradoxical cliche (no less true for being so) about the consequence of this advance was suavely expressed in Latin by the Emperor Augustus's admirer the Roman poet Horace: 'Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium.'
³³
The relationship was always edgy, its awkwardness symbolized by newly imperial Rome's adoption of a convenient fiction that it had been founded by descendants of Aeneas, a refugee from Troy, that archetypal foe of the Greeks in the Homeric epics. So through the Romans' triumph in the East, Troy had finally triumphed over the Greeks. Nevertheless the Romans became fascinated by Greek culture and philosophy, which complemented their own highly developed skills in military affairs, administration and matters of law. Greek became just as much an international language as Latin for the Roman Empire. Indeed, it was the
lingua franca
of the Middle East in the time of Jesus, and it was the language which, in a rather vulgar marketplace form, most Christians spoke in everyday life during the Church's first two centuries of existence. By the sixth and seventh centuries, Greek was ousting Latin as the official language of the surviving Eastern Roman Empire, with the strong encouragement of the Christian Church. That was an achievement unparalleled among languages of supposedly defeated peoples, and a tribute to Hellenistic cultural vitality and adaptability long after the end of the various Hellenistic monarchies.

The Roman rule which Jesus experienced had undergone a great transition, from Republic to imperial monarchy. It is surprising that the Republic had postponed trouble for so long, but its structures proved increasingly inadequate to cope with running its bloated empire. Rising poverty, land hunger and an accumulated popular sense of injustice came to a head around 100 BCE. Seventy years of misery and intermittent civil war followed, ending with the defeat of one party boss by another in 31 BCE, when Octavian won a naval victory at Actium against Mark Antony and his ally the Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, Cleopatra. Octavian, adopted heir of the assassinated general and dictator Julius Caesar, achieved supreme power within the Roman state in a series of unscrupulous manoeuvres; he now had to hang on to his power and bring back peace to the shattered state. His lasting success came through meticulous adherence to all the old forms of the Republican constitution. The Senate and the two annual consuls continued to function for centuries - in fact a Roman Senate modelled on that of old Rome was still convening in Constantinople until the extinction of this New Rome in 1453.
³⁴

Behind the facade, Octavian carried out a revolution in government. Careful to avoid the hated title of King, he arranged that the Senate should give him the harmless-sounding title of First Citizen (
princeps
), while renaming himself Augustus, a symbol of a fresh start after the wretchedness of civil war. This is the name we find used for him in the Christian scriptures, the New Testament. To show his good intentions, Augustus also graciously accepted the office of tribune, the only officer in the old constitution who still commanded any affection among ordinary people, but he also assumed a traditional military title of honour which Julius Caesar had held, commander -
imperator.
Now he was the first of the Roman emperors, with a succession which lasted until 1453. This was the title that mattered: it signified his control of the army, which had traditionally bestowed the honour by acclamation, the real basis for imperial power from now on. The virtually perpetual warfare which so dominated the Roman past meant that the best justification for holding power in the Republic had been a track record of military success: hence the importance of the
imperator
title. Augustus made sure that his various publicists magnified a personal record as a military commander which was in reality decidedly unimpressive.
³⁵

Ordinary people raised few objections to Augustus's new role as
imperator
; they had little nostalgia for the Roman Republic, which had done nothing for seven decades but produce misery. As far as they were concerned, the old forms had been a sham anyway, so what difference would it make if Augustus elaborated the pretence through traditional titles and institutions? He paid particular attention to beautifying Rome. Central to various symbols of his achievements was a monumental 'Altar of Peace' (
Ara pacis
) voted him by a grateful (or at least politically realistic) Senate, which can still be admired in Rome, albeit now on a new site chosen by that latter-day failed Augustus, Benito Mussolini. The theme of peace was well chosen: most Romans were more interested in the fact that Augustus brought them peace and prosperity than they were in the Republic. For all that his own military prowess was dubious, Augustus and his successors tore down political frontiers all round the Mediterranean, and by controlling piracy, they made it comparatively safe and easy to travel from one end of the sea to the other. The first great exponent of a worldwide Christianity, the Apostle Paul, made the most of this, and so would the Christian faith as a whole. Without the general peace brought by Roman power, Christianity's westward spread would have been far more unlikely.