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 C
lassical 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 discuss
ion 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).
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