The Story of Greece and Rome

by Tony Spawforth

  One other issue of coins by this rogue emperor merits a pause. It shows him trying to insinuate for contemporaries who handled them his legitimate place in the new arrangements of imperial power emerging on the Continent at the end of the third century AD. One side shows not one but three bearded emperors in overlapping profile. The Latin legend reads ‘Carausius and his brothers’. Carausius here cheekily proposes himself as a colleague, equal indeed, of soldier co-emperors who were restoring stability to the Continental empire.

  The faux team spirit of this coin is reminiscent of a famous sight in Venice. Visitors stop to take photographs of a curious group of sculptured figures built into the outside of the Doge’s Palace. Clearly ancient, they catch the eye because they are carved in the purple stone known as porphyry. Roman emperors – as depicted here – favoured this material for their portraits because in real life they wore purple clothes as a sign of their rank.

  Art historians used to shudder at the style of these figures as evidence for the decline of classical art. Four mature men, similar looking and identically dressed in military garb, stand together in pairs, each twosome clasped in fraternal embrace. All stare intensely at the viewer. Nowadays experts see here the sculptor’s success in conveying a political ideal of group solidarity and martial hardiness.

  As to who they are, identification cannot be entirely certain, but this foursome seems to represent a new political system inaugurated in AD 293 – a team of emperors: two senior ones, shown earlier with Carausius, and now joined here by two junior ones. They wanted to present the Roman public with an image of harmonious industry as each one in his theatre helped to put the empire back to rights. The first to obtain the imperial power was the initiator of these arrangements. His name was Diocletian, an important reformer, as we shall see in a later chapter.

  Under Diocletian’s college of four (the so-called Tetrarchy), the Roman state once more persecuted the sect of the Christians. It is time to think more about the religions of the early Roman Empire, since one of them turned out to have the power to transform the empire into a monotheistic state, with longer-term consequences still with us today.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE ‘JESUS MOVEMENT’

  For twelve or so years in my former university I worked next door to the professor of Latin. John and I were often in and out of each other’s offices. I marvelled that his made mine look positively tidy. When he came into mine, it was usually because his fine brain was whirring and he needed someone to talk at. In his fifties and early sixties, John was increasingly consumed by his researches into the New Testament.

  Among specialists, the origins and early days of Christianity, no less than those of Islam, are fiercely controversial. John’s researches in this area were no exception. I remember going to hear him give a paper in the School of Divinity of a university neighbour. A senior Anglican prelate sporting clerical purple beneath his grey suit had his eyes raised heavenward for much of the talk, as if silently praying for strength to hear John out.

  The early Jesus movement, as John sometimes called it, crystallized around a charismatic healer figure of Jewish ethnicity who never left his native Judaea – a Roman province – during his short life. His public stance as a religious expert brought him to the attention of the Roman authorities. They saw him as politically dangerous and sentenced him to death, probably because Pontius Pilate, the governor, did not want to be seen as soft on possible sedition.

  Within two generations of Jesus’ crucifixion around AD 30, Greek writings offering accounts of his life and afterlife, as well as the teaching activity of his first followers in cities of the Roman world, were in circulation. Five of these survive today as books of the New Testament – the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. What fascinated John was how the Greek-speakers who read or listened to readings of these first Christian writings might have ‘heard’ the Greek.

  He was convinced that these writings were not just addressing an ideal audience of Greek-reading Jews, including Jewish followers of the new movement. Their authors also, he thought, wrote in a particular way so as to snag the interest of educated Greek-speaking people in the non-Jewish world. These would-be readers were used to, and appreciative of, the allusive tricks typical of Greek literature of the higher sort.

  Such literary tricks included punning on people’s names. John pointed out that the name ‘Iesous’ is a Greek rendering of a Hebrew name translatable as ‘Yaweh saves’. He charted how often in the Gospels ‘Iesous’ is coupled with the Greek verb meaning ‘to cure’ or ‘heal’ (iasthai). Greek readers would have ‘heard’ this pun in sentence after sentence, like subliminal advertising. What the pun helped to paint, John thought, was a vivid picture of Jesus as a healer, or rather, the Healer, a figure far outstripping the pagan competition.

  Among scholars, John’s views are not quite mainstream. Competition there certainly was, however. As the title of a book on the subject put it, the Roman Empire was ‘a world full of gods’. All over the empire, towns funded and organized the worship of their local pantheons. In Ephesus in western Turkey the evangelizing Paul of Tarsus had a memorable brush with a silversmith who feared for his livelihood. He made images of his city’s world-renowned divinity, Artemis, and here was Paul impudently teaching that man-made gods were, well, just that.

  Today you can walk the well-preserved thoroughfares of Roman Ephesus, one of the great cities of the empire. Paved marble streets and plazas take you past impressive public buildings. The pièce de résistance, a marvel of modern restoration, is a public library, fronted by a gorgeous façade of marble columns and sculptures personifying the donor’s ‘Wisdom’, ‘Knowledge’, ‘Intelligence’ and so on.

  The walls of another public amenity, the theatre, spectacular for its size, once hosted a long Greek inscription – 568 lines, no less. This was a heroic act of letter-cutting by ancient masons perched on ladders or scaffolding, since the letters were placed well above human height. It was as if what mattered was the general impression on the ancient passer-by of the great mass of lettering picked out in red.

  The curious stranger in this harbour entrepôt asking a local person what it all meant might have learnt the following – that the text recorded a rich donor’s gift to his fellow Ephesians of gold and silver religious images that were to be carried in a great annual procession through the city.

  The Greek lists the images. The lion’s share (ten) were to depict Artemis, the city-goddess par excellence. The remainder included statuettes of ‘our lord Emperor’ – Trajan in this case, who ruled from 98 to 117 – and his empress; the ‘deified’ Augustus; other Greek divinities; personifications – the ‘revered Senate’ and Roman People, along with various civic bodies; and the city’s founders. This blend of pagan piety, imperial loyalism and civic patriotism is a reasonable snapshot of how many inhabitants of the empire experienced this ‘world full of gods’ when they joined in the crowded calendars of religious celebrations laid on by their local authorities.

  The religious prominence of Roman emperors deserves more thought. Not just in Ephesus, but everywhere throughout the empire, there were temples, statues, priests, altars, sacrifices and processions all given over to venerating the Roman emperor as if he were a god. Scholars trace the origins of Roman ruler worship back to the Greeks.

  As seen, among Greeks this way of thinking and acting had rapidly spiked when they found themselves ruled by the phenomenon that was Alexander. After his death Greeks venerated his successors, the Hellenistic kings. When Rome conquered the east, they worshipped the new power as Roma, a goddess, not to mention individual Romans, usually generals, like Flamininus, ‘liberator’ of Greece. When Octavian became Augustus, they took to worshipping him and his wife; and on it went.

  Here is how a Japanese believer in 1912 wrote about the divinity of the late Emperor Meiji for the benefit of scoffing Westerners:

  All soldiers and sailors were ready to die for their Mikado, and the generals and admirals, too,
commanded those soldiers and sailors with their own devotion towards the Mikado . . . If the Mohammedans concentrate[d] their souls by the faith in Mohammed, and if the Christians concentrated their souls by the faith in Christ, the result should be all the same. I often meet so-called philosophers who are laughing at the superstitions of the religious people or the Mikado-worshipping of Japanese. However right and accurate may be their reasoning, I must say their philosophies are only too shallow. They ought to proceed one step further and think what influence has the concentration of the whole nation’s souls! The concentration of our hearts and souls is itself our own God who reigns over us.

  Roman subjects of the pre-Christian emperors have left behind no statements which can match this heady mixture of religious and nationalist fervour. In their case, how much was encouragement from above, how much spontaneous initiative by the local authorities? What were the private views of the urbane men and women who served as imperial priests and priestesses all over the empire, people more often than not from much the same cultured background as Polybius in the second century BC, with his startling capacity for treating religious rites as the ‘opium of the masses’? Whether we can know if even the huddled masses ‘believed’ in the divinity of (say) Trajan in the same way that they ‘believed’ in the other powers to whom they addressed prayers for miraculous help with their lives; how much one can generalize, ever, about what, even nowadays, individuals over a lifetime think, as opposed to say or do, about God – all this and more is part of a modern debate that we cannot go into here.

  What we can say is that for some in the Roman Empire the worship of the emperor was another form of flattery; and that for some his local temple symbolized Roman rule, and not always in a good way – when the British queen Boudicca led a revolt, the rebels targeted ‘the temple raised to the deified Claudius’ in what is now Colchester: this ‘continually met the view, like the citadel of an eternal tyranny’.

  For many, perhaps the majority, used to taking divinity for granted, the monuments and rites of emperor worship in their town provided entertainment – there were shows of gladiators, wild beast hunts and much more, as well as festive distributions, sacrificial dinners and so on. It may also have given them reassurance of the reality and ‘god-like’ powers of a distant ruler whom few would ever see in person.

  Today many people do not hold with religion being the basis of statehood. As we have seen time and again, this was not true of the ancient states encountered in this book. At Rome, the emperor, as well as being godlike himself, was pontifex maximus, head of Roman religion. He was responsible for maintaining good relations between the Roman gods and the Roman people. Among other things he monitored the state priests of Rome. This was a deadly serious business.

  In the AD 80s emperor Domitian felt obliged to mete out the traditional punishment of burial alive when one of the six Vestal Virgins in Rome itself – they tended the sacred fire symbolizing the continuity of the state – was charged with sexual impurity. To the very end she protested – performed, rather – her chastity:

  Whether she was innocent or not, she certainly appeared to be so. Nay, even when she was being let down into the dreadful pit and her dress caught as she was being lowered, she turned and readjusted it, and when the executioner offered her his hand she declined it and drew back, as though she put away from her with horror the idea of having her chaste and pure body defiled by his loathsome touch.

  Beyond the state religion and the more or less official cults of the provinces, there existed a sea of unofficial and largely unregulated religious expression.

  In the early nineteenth century a slightly mysterious figure who called himself Jean d’Anastasi, perhaps Armenian, washed up in the Ottoman client state of Egypt. Here he befriended the pasha and started to buy ancient Greek papyri offered to him by dealers in Egyptian antiquities. Eventually he sent his collection for auction. It ended up divided between various top museums in Europe. Here is an extract from one of his papyri:

  Take a sprig of laurel and write the two names on its leaves, the one: ‘[AKRAKANARBA] KRAKANARBA RAKANARBA AKANARBA KANARBA ANARBA NARBA ARBA RBA BA A’; the other: ‘SANTALALA ANTALALA NTALALA TALALA ALALA LALA ALA LA A.’ Take another sprig with twelve leaves on it, and inscribe on it the following heart-shaped name, while you begin with a sacred utterance [etc.].

  Readers of J. K. Rowling might be forgiven for feeling themselves back at wizardry school. The ancient user of this hocus pocus (the spell and accompanying instructions continue on the papyrus for many lines) would have felt himself in terrain both strange and familiar – a land of ancient Egyptian wisdom, yes, but mixed in with major Greek divinities: this spell goes on to invoke Apollo and Zeus among others.

  This is not the same sector of humanity’s religious experience as the one explored by the twenty-first-century American psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his researches on the link between exposure to moral elevation or beauty and the religious impulse. Earlier we came across fear of ghosts among the Greek settlers of Selinus in Sicily back in the fifth century BC. In the early Roman Empire beliefs and activities nowadays distinguished from conventional religion as the ‘supernatural’ or ‘paranormal’ were a more seamless part of the religious spectrum. The Roman world teemed with freelance soothsayers, magicians, sorcerers, astrologers, dream interpreters, fortune-tellers and the rest of it.

  The attitude of the state to these activities in the main was one of tolerance. Emperors, indeed, might have such people at their court. As we saw in the last chapter, some said that the miraculous rain saving the Roman army under Marcus Aurelius was brought about by a member of the imperial entourage. This Egyptian magician, called Arnouphis, supposedly invoked the god of the air, Mercury, and thus attracted the rain.

  So it is a surprise in some ways to find a Roman emperor persecuting the Jesus movement just over a generation after its founder’s crucifixion. At least, that is what the ancients came to believe. In AD 64 a fire devastated the city of Rome. Rather like the Great Fire of London in 1666, it broke out in shops, raged for days and left parts of the city a smoking ruin.

  Another similarity was the scapegoating. In 1681 the aldermen of the City of London added an inscription on Christopher Wren’s column commemorating the fire, blaming it on ‘Ye treachery and malice of ye popish factio’. In imperial Rome, the finger pointing was directed – so we are told – at ‘Christiani’.

  To get rid of the rumour [of arson], Nero found and provided the defendants, and he afflicted with the most refined punishments those persons whom, hated for their shameful acts, the common people were accustomed to call Chrestiani . . . a very large number were convicted, less on the charge of having set the fire than because of their hatred of humankind . . . Covered with the hides of wild animals they perished by being torn to pieces by dogs or, fixed to stakes [or, crosses] they were set afire in the darkening evening as a form of night spectacle.

  But can we believe the Roman historian who alone recounts this tale of Neronian villainy? Tacitus wrote his history of the first Roman emperors some two generations after these events. Like Thucydides he was an ancient historical writer of high quality, well worth reading in his own right for anyone who wants to experience how good the history-writing of the ancient Romans can get.

  It may be that Tacitus inadvertently set down what in fact was an embroidered version of events circulating in his day. Leaving Christians aside, Nero perhaps did seek to appease the populace by finding ‘culprits’. By using them as human torches, he then sanctioned a Roman-style penalty. This would have mimicked, not the Crucifixion, as often thought, but the crime of arson: burning alive.

  If ‘Christians’ got into the story later, this could be because in the early second century the new sect was starting to seep into the Roman consciousness. This was as a result of developments not in Rome, but rather where they might be expected, the Greek-speaking provinces of the Roman east. Here early proselytizers for the Jesus movement – the Apostles �
�� are well documented, as we saw in the case of Ephesus.

  On 24 August AD 79, Mount Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples erupted. One of the observers was a Roman polymath whose daily routine, his nephew tells us, included an afternoon’s sunbathe – an early record of heliotherapy. The uncle’s fascination with the unfolding eruption proved fatal. He died from the dense fumes before he could reach safety.

  Later (around AD 110) the nephew, known to us as Pliny the Younger, a Roman consul, was sent to govern one of Rome’s Black Sea provinces in what is now northern Turkey. Here he found himself at a loss when local people denounced some of their fellows to him as ‘Christians’. His interrogations of the accused produced information offering the earliest ‘official’ view of the movement that survives. He was told about praying to Christ, about pledging under oath to abide by moral precepts such as not committing adultery or telling lies, and about common meals.

  The movement had acquired some purchase in the towns, where there were Christians in sufficient numbers to cause a perceptible decline in the sale of sacrificial meat in the markets. Christians abhorred animal sacrifice and refused to take part in it in any shape or form. This marked them out as different in an age where sacrifice was a more or less universal religious practice for inhabitants of the Roman Empire, no matter what their local cultural heritage.

  Pliny thought that there were rural Christians too. He had carried out a basic test by asking the accused to ‘offer worship with wine and incense’ before a portable statue of the emperor, which he had had brought in to the courtroom specially. Observing the status-based gradations of legal privilege in Roman society of this time, he had executed those provincials who were not Roman citizens and who refused to recant.