Caesar and Christ (Story of Civilization, #3)

by Will Durant

Contentment is as rare among men as it is natural among animals, and no form of government has ever satisfied its subjects.

Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.

The Second Punic War changed the face of the western Mediterranean. It gave Spain and all its wealth to Rome, providing the funds for the Roman conquest of Greece. It reunited Italy under Rome’s unquestioned mastery and threw open all routes and markets to Roman ships and goods. But it was the most costly of all ancient wars. It ravaged or injured half the farms of Italy, destroyed 400 towns, killed 300,000 men;31 southern Italy has never quite recovered from it to this day. It weakened democracy by showing that a popular assembly cannot wisely choose generals or direct a war. It began the transformation of Roman life and morals by hurting agriculture and helping trade; by taking men from the countryside and teaching them the violence of battle and the promiscuity of the camp; by bringing the precious metals of Spain to finance new luxuries and imperialistic expansion; and by enabling Italy to live on the extorted wheat of Spain, Sicily, and Africa. It was a pivotal event for almost every phase of Roman history.

In the early centuries Rome’s dead had been cremated; now, usually, they were buried, though some obstinate conservatives preferred combustion. In either case, the remains were placed in a tomb that became an altar of worship upon which pious descendants periodically placed some flowers and a little food. Here, as in Greece and the Far East, the stability of morals and society was secured by the worship of ancestors and by the belief that somewhere their spirits survived and watched. If they were very great and good, the dead, in Hellenized Roman mythology, passed to the Elysian Fields, or the Islands of the Blessed; nearly all, however, descended into the earth, to the shadowy realm of Orcus and Pluto. Pluto, the Roman form of the Greek god Hades, was armed with a mallet to stun the dead; Orcus (our ogre) was the monster who then devoured the corpse. Because Pluto was the most exalted of the underground deities, and because the earth was the ultimate source of wealth and often the repository of accumulated food and goods, he was worshiped also as the god of riches and plutocrats; and his wife Proserpina—the strayed daughter of Ceres—became the goddess of the germinating corn. Sometimes the Roman Hell was conceived as a place of punishment;

in most cases it was pictured as the abode of half-formless shades that had been men, not distinguished from one another by reward or punishment, but all equally suffering eternal darkness and final anonymity. There at last, said Lucian, one would find democracy.

As currency multiplied in Italy faster than building, the owners of realty in the capital tripled their fortunes without stirring a muscle or a nerve. Industry lagged while commerce flourished; Rome did not have to produce goods; it took the world’s money and paid with that for the world’s goods.

“He who steals from a citizen,” said Cato, “ends his days in fetters and chains; but he who steals from the community ends them in purple and gold.”17

The Greek conquest of Rome took the form of sending Greek religion and comedy to the Roman plebs; Greek morals, philosophy, and art to the upper classes. These Greek gifts conspired with wealth and empire in that sapping of Roman faith and character which was one part of Hellas’ long revenge upon her conquerors. The conquest reached its climax in Roman philosophy, from the stoic Epicureanism of Lucretius to the epicurean Stoicism of Seneca. In Christian theology Greek metaphysics overcame the gods of Italy. Greek culture triumphed in the rise of Constantinople as first the rival and then the successor of Rome; and when Constantinople fell, Greek literature, philosophy, and art reconquered Italy and Europe in the Renaissance. This is the central stream in the history of European civilization; all other currents are tributaries. “It was no little brook that flowed from Greece into our city,” said Cicero, “but a mighty river of culture and learning.”24 Henceforth the mental, artistic, and religious life of Rome was a part of the Hellenistic world.

Stoicism became the inspiration of Scipio, the ambition of Cicero, the better self of Seneca, the guide of Trajan, the consolation of Aurelius, and the conscience of Rome.

Ceterum censeo delendam esse Carthaginem—“Besides, I think that Carthage must be destroyed.”

It was not unusual for 10,000 slaves to be auctioned off at Delos in a single day. In 177, 40,000 Sardinians, in 167, 150,000 Epirotes, were captured by Roman armies and sold as slaves, in the latter case at approximately a dollar a head.

“The beasts of the field and the birds of the air,” said Tiberius to the poorer plebeians in one of the epochal orations in Roman history, have their holes and their hiding places; but the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy only the light and the air. Our generals urge their soldiers to fight for the graves and shrines of their ancestors. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar. You have no ancestral tomb. You fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. You are called the masters of the world, but there is not a foot of ground that you can call your own.7

The Republic died at Pharsalus; the revolution ended at Actium. Rome had completed the fatal cycle known to Plato and to us: monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchic exploitation, democracy, revolutionary chaos, dictatorship. Once more, in the great systole and diastole of history, an age of freedom ended and an age of discipline began.

Marriage was to the ancients a union of families rather than of bodies or souls; and the demands of religion or fatherland were placed above the rights or whim of the individual.

Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter; Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.

Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the Church; the Greek language, having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual; the Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the Mass. Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the Last Judgment, and a personal immortality of reward and punishment; from Egypt the adoration of the Mother and Child, and the mystic theosophy that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Christian creed; there, too, Christian monasticism would find its exemplars and its source. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the resurrection drama of Adonis; from Thrace, perhaps, the cult of Dionysus, the dying and saving god. From Persia came millennarianism, the “ages of the world,” the “final conflagration,” the dualism of Satan and God, of Darkness and Light; already in the Fourth Gospel Christ is the “Light shining in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.”84 The Mithraic ritual so closely resembled the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass that Christian fathers charged the Devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds.85 Christianity was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.

As Judea had given Christianity ethics, and Greece had given it theology, so now Rome gave it organization; all these, with a dozen absorbed and rival faiths, entered into the Christian synthesis. It was not merely that the Church took over some religious customs and forms common in pre-Christian Rome—the stole and other vestments of pagan priests, the use of incense and holy water in purifications, the burning of candles and an everlasting light before the altar, the worship of the saints, the architecture of the basilica, the law of Rome as a basis for canon law, the title of Pontifex Maximus for the Supreme Pontiff, and, in the fourth century, the Latin language as the noble and enduring vehicle of Catholic ritual. The Roman gift was above all a vast framework of government, which, as secular authority failed, became the structure of ecclesiastical rule. Soon the bishops, rather than the Roman prefects, would be the source of order and the seat of power in the cities; the metropolitans, or archbishops, would support, if not supplant, the provincial governors; and the synod of bishops would succeed the provincial assembly. The Roman Church followed in the footsteps of the Roman state; it conquered the provinces, beautified the capital, and established discipline and unity from frontier to frontier. Rome died in giving birth to the Church; the Church matured by inheriting and accepting the responsibilities of Rome.

It was no whim of history that made the army supreme in the third century; internal causes had weakened the state and left it exposed on every front. The cessation of expansion after Trajan, and again after Septimius Severus, was the signal for attack; and as Rome had conquered nations by dividing them, so now the barbarians began to conquer her by uniting in simultaneous assaults. The necessity of defense exalted the power of arms and the prestige of soldiery; generals replaced philosophers on the throne, and the last reign of the aristocracy yielded to the revived rule of force.