Pax Romana

The sacred fire of Vesta had burned for almost a thousand years; from a time when Rome was an obscure village on the Tiber, to its zenith as the capital of a superpower in the third century. It was believed that if the fire was ever was ever extinguished, the arcane rituals botched, or the virginal purity of its priestesses ever compromised, it would spell disaster for the city and the state. It was also the public manifestation of the most numinous form of worship in the ancient Roman world; the family. For at the heart of every home sat a flame that was the heart of their own ancestral cult, a deeply private form of worship which Vesta drew into the public gaze with her annual public festivals. To the heads of each Roman household it was thought if the family flame ever perished, so would the family itself, and as such its maintenance was the central focus of their activities and ambitions, and had been — as far as they were concerned — since the dawn of time.

How long these fires were actually nurtured will forever be unknown. Today, from the perspective of the far future of ancient Rome, we think that our earliest prehuman ancestors carried around flames captured from bushfires or lightning strikes in bundles of moss long before we could even create it; perhaps half a million years ago. If these carefully tended fires were ever to be extinguished then the group also lost the ability to cook food or create campfires, and there was a very real chance the family would perish in a very literal sense. Even if it is unlikely that these elite families had tended exact same fire since prehistory, they nurtured sacred ideas perhaps older than humanity itself. But soon, these fires would be extinguished forever.

Vesta was just one cult in the colourful tapestry of deities in polytheistic Rome whose existences were woven into the lives of its inhabitants in rolling landscapes of shrines, groves and temples. Historian Edward G.Watts speaks of the;

“Vast sacred infrastructure that had been built up over the past three millennia. The size, age, and pervasiveness of this infrastructure likely would have made it difficult for anyone to appreciate fully all of the ways in which traditional religious practice influences the rhythms of public, domestic and family life.”

Some of the Roman Gods had Etruscan origin, such as Janus, the god of transitions, Minerva, goddess of handicrafts, and Mars, the god of war. Some shared deep cultural genealogy with the Greek deities. Vulcan, the god of technology seemingly had the same cultural roots as his Greek counterpart, Hephaestus. Mercury, the god of commerce shared origins with his Greek equivalent Hermes, and so on. Some gods faded into obscurity as the elites drifted from their agricultural roots, such as Vervactor, god of “turning over uncultivated land” and “Imporcitor”, god of “ploughing with wide furrows”. Later in the Republican period, some represented more abstract concepts or qualities, such as the goddess “Victory” and Elpis, goddess of “Hope”.

The interior of the Temple of Vesta

As the Republic became an Empire and was exposed through conquest to new cultures across Europe, North Africa and Mesopotamia, new sects were folded — mostly peacefully — into the Roman pantheon. This was often achieved by retconning their own overarching mythic system to present new additions as revivals of lost traditions. At times of social anxiety, there were spasms of persecution and scapegoating, notably of the transgressive, foreign “youth-culture” cult of Dionysius during the Punic War. Overall though, the Roman Empire was tolerant of different sects, proud, even, of the rich tapestry of beliefs woven over the 6.5 million square kilometres of Pax Romana where — it was presumed — local cultures could thrive in the absence of warlords and banditry. The price the ruled paid for this — other than taxes — was deference to the Roman way of life and its paideia; the systems of law and education that they thought alone could save humanity from brutalism and savagery.

But things are never simple. And Rome’s very success in maintaining peace within its borders came to undermine this key selling point of stability. Because for many young people growing up in the Empire peace meant escape from the shackles of rural life and the weight of family expectations. This mobility from the provinces to the city led to a growing cosmopolitan class who were thrown around the empire by chance, adventure and fate, and whose native culture gradually faded into memory. Classicist Peter Brown writes that it meant;

“wider horizons and unprecedented opportunities for travel; it meant the erosion of local differences through trade and emigration, and the weakening of ancient barriers before new wealth and new criteria of status. Imperceptibly, the Roman empire dissolved in the lower classes that sense of tradition and local loyalties on which the upper class depended.”

Rome didn’t just upset traditionalist parents whose children took to backpacking or fame-seeking in the cities, it was resented in much more explicit form as naked imperial domination. Having been subject to rule by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians and Greeks for centuries, and recognising only their own god, Judean traditionalists were perennially rebellious. During the period of Greek dominance in 160 BCE there was a guerrilla war against the Hellenes triggered by a refusal to worship their gods. The “Maccabean revolt” was a success, resulting in compromise with the authorities, but even this did not satisfy the most pious of orthodox Jews who saw the victorious Hasmonean dynasty as sellouts. Seemingly traumatised by the eight centuries of oppression and the political chaos they saw around them they believed that the world itself was about to end. And that from this cataclysm their God would destroy their enemies and established a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth; an eternal theocracy. This community, the Essenes, practiced an austere form of religious communism of which the historian Josephus later wrote highly;

“Riches they despise, and their community of goods is truly admirable; you will not find one among them distinguished by greater opulence than another. They have a law that new members on admission to the sect shall confiscate their property to the order, with the result that you will nowhere see either abject poverty or inordinate wealth; the individual’s possessions join the common stock.”

While moderately successful for a time — reaching numbers of about 4000 — being all-male presented certain difficulties when it came to propagating itself, especially when the end-times stubbornly failed to materialise. This resulted in a tense relationship to women, and to keep their community alive they adopted orphan boys and indulged in sexual liaisons with women only if absolutely necessary as their “wantoness” was seen as a corrupting force. The Essenes may have become just another obscure reclusive sect in the cosmopolitan fabric of Rome had their central beliefs not been shared by a growing number of others in the region. This revelation (in Greek, apocalypsis) eventually came to be a widespread belief in the sects of the Near East and North Africa. Although it is not known for certain, it has been plausibly argued that John the Baptist was an Essene, for he shared a substantial number of their beliefs, including those the imminent end times. So too did his disciple, Jesus. Historian Bart Ehrman writes that;

“The earliest sources that we have consistently ascribe an apocalyptic message to Jesus… It appears that when the end never did arrive, Christians had to take stock of the fact that Jesus said it would and changed his message accordingly. You can hardly blame them.”

In short, the region of Judea was aglow with this apocalyptic frenzy and is perhaps something we moderns can recognise from more recent episodes of mass hysteria, such as Y2K and 2012. However in the classical world, the notion that the world could “end” for all eternity was revolutionary. And it was to go from obscure theological detail of Near Eastern cults to an idea that would come to channel the intellectual evolution of the West for the next two thousand years.

A rupture in time

In the cosmologies of archaic societies, time was not thought to only run in one direction. Rituals that invoked stories of the dawn of time were thought to literally reenact these events to draw on their sacred energy. It was thought by narrating the mythical origins of the cosmos all the way down to a place or an animal, it was possible to attain power over it. And while this was true for archaic communities in a mythic sense, it was also true in a practical one. Because while the stories were fantastical they were also the containers of very much practical information about how to find and exploit resources and thus survive in a given environment.

While the time of sacred origins was invoked to “remake” the world in archaic cultures, notions the “end” of the world were often absent, perhaps because notions of time itself were still vague. Later civilisations; Mesopotamia, India China, and the classical world all retained sacred creation myths, with the added innovation that time was cyclical; that a vanished golden age would come again after a great catastrophe; a cosmological innovation that emerged seemingly in parallel with the invention of the agricultural information technology of the calendar. Influenced by this, the cosmos was seen to repeat over and over again, for eternity. For the Aztecs, it was the concept of “Suns” that would end variously by fire or flood only to give birth to the world anew. In India it was “Yugas” of immense length, that ended in the cosmic dance of Shiva who would destroy the universe, only for it to be reborn. These disasters would be inflexion points; both the beginning and the end of the world — a cataclysm that would give rise to a new Golden Age that would decay as the cycle continued again. Christianity represented a rupture with this concept of time; there would still be a catastrophe at the end of the world, but now the new world that emerged at the end would continue for all eternity. As Mircea Eliade describes in Myth and Reality;

“The end of the world will occur only once, just as the cosmogony occurred only once. The cosmos that will appear after the catastrophe will be the same cosmos God created at the beginning of Time, but purified, regenerated, restored to its original glory. This Earthly Paradise will not be destroyed again, will have no end. Time is no longer the circular Time of the Eternal Return; it has become a linear and irreversible Time. Nor is this all: the eschatology also represents the triumph of a Sacred History. For the End of the World will reveal the religions value of human acts, and men will be judged on their acts.”

If Jesus were just one of a plethora of would-be Jewish apocalyptic preachers in ancient Juedea, what explains the appeal of his message in the rest of the Roman Empire? Recall the centrality of the ancestral alters tended by Roman families that were the centre of their spiritual world. By the Imperial period in the first and second centuries, this was largely the preserve of the Roman elites. Many of the lower classes did not have them, neither did slaves or their freeman descendants, or for that matter many of its conquered peoples whose cultural traditions were being slowly eroded by the imperial system. The new mobile cosmopolitan class of merchants and career-seekers too felt a growing spiritual vacuum as their roots gradually withered and their identities themselves became more and more of a phantom.

The new gospels as recounted by Paul were a radical departure from both the family cults and the of the worship pagan gods, including the cult of the Emperor. Previously it was assumed inequality was inevitable and natural; something that humans just had to live with and work around. With Christianity came class and gender agnostic moral equality and a melting away of caste and ethnic distinctions; “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ.” At the same time, it opened the door to individual relationships with the divine that bypassed the need for any hierarchy or family bonds and placed emphasis on the will of the individual and their deeds. For a generation adrift and lost, either through agency or economics, Christianity offered a new type of fraternity and a new vision of eternity. Historian Larry Siedentop writes that;

“Now, through the story of Jesus, individual moral agency was raised up as providing a unique window into the nature of things, into the experience grace rather than necessity, a glimpse of something transcending death. The individual replaced the family as the focus of immortality.”

Rejecting hierarchy, the appeal of Early Christianity was of extreme equality derived from communistic sects like the Essenes, although for the time stripped of its more misogynistic elements. Unlike the priestesses of Vesta who were chosen randomly to serve for 30 year periods by drawing lots (and faced being buried alive if they ever took a lover), women from any strata of society could become Christian by their own free will and to do so was seen as a form of empowerment. This is supported by the first historical reference to Christianity in the Roman record, which was a mail exchange between Emperor Trajan and Pliny the Younger, who had been tasked with cleaning up the province of Pontus. In Pliny’s correspondence, he casually refers to the torture of two Christians, slave women “who they call deaconesses”. He concluded that it was “nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths.” What exactly Pliny mean by “extravagant lengths?”

Descended from these apocalyptic, communistic cults, the early Christians were radical in their rejection of just about anything that did not fit into their vision of the world. What most wound-up the Romans was a contempt for the law and a refusal to acknowledge their gods and offer sacrifices to them. What’s so difficult? The Romans fumed. Such eccentricities made Christianity seem alien even by the standards of classical cults, so much so that they were referred to as “atheists”. It seemed perverse the way they turned poverty into a virtue and vilified wealth. The supposed pacifism of the Christians and their refusal of military service was a cause of much annoyance, as was their obstinate desire to martyr themselves at all costs.

Martyrdom was an outcome of the fetishisation of Christ’s suffering and led to a knack of escalating every brush with the law into a drama that may end in their torture or death. Some magistrates were frustrated during trials in which the defendant would answer every question with the phrase “I am a Christian” thus leading courtroom deliberations down a one-way path. What was most infuriating to the Romans was the explosion in popularity of this weird subculture with its “suicide by cop” mentality. Rumours abound. Why did they call each other “brother” and “sister” while holding hands? Were they incestuous? There were even rumours swirling around that they worshipped a crucified donkey.

The more educated of the old-guard knew this wasn’t so, but considered their singe-minded and inflexible monotheism as crude and unsophisticated. Contrary to today’s caricatures of polytheism, they did have a notion of a “One God” but considered it too immense a concept to be captured by any one deity. Only through living in the full tapestry of its multiple incarnations could one hope to be immersed in this expansive oneness. To them, Christian dogma was just stubborn and petulant. Roman intellectual Celsus had contempt for their credulous tendency to think and talk in slogans, saying they;

“Do not want to give or to receive a reason for what they believe, and use such expressions as “Do not ask questions; just believe”, and “Thy faith will save thee”.”

Celsus saw this habit to blindly “listen and believe” to be an existential threat to Rome; an attitude of unthinkingly accepting dogma which he put down to a lack of education. In about 180 CE he wrote a new book called The True Word, which was a muscular and humorous treatise seemingly designed to outrage them and the first systematic attempt to dismantle Christian thinking. Amongst other things, he accused The Virgin Mary of having been knocked up by a Roman soldier and mocked them for having “culturally appropriated” their holy books from the Jews. As for the eschatological idea of Judgement Day, he wrote that it was so stupid that “a drunken old woman would have been ashamed to sing…it to lull a little child to sleep”. Apparently, though, Celsus and the Roman elite were missing something, for the religion continued to grow year-on-year and in both numbers and influence.

Religion of the network

While the desire for martyrdom bewildered many a Roman magistrate, from a Christian perspective it was a new, egalitarian form of heroism. While the myths of the Romans and the Greeks were of remote, semi-divine aristocrats, Christian heroism was open for anyone to participate in, no matter how humble a background. In later centuries, the stories of the “Saints” would act as both role-models and adventure stories, much as the Greco-Roman canon did. Martyrdom offered a pathway for anyone to achieve immortality with the right amount of moral fortitude. Gender, social status, or even species was no impediment (Saint Guinefort was a dog). Sidenhop says tales of the Saints;

“Combined elements from stories of Wild West, crime novels and science fiction with morality tales… they democratised the ancient cult of the hero… It did not depend on birthright, gender, bodily strength or mere cunning.”

Besides offering this equitable fast-track to immortality, the success of the Christians also relied on an innovation of information technology; the Coptic Alphabet. It was a multicultural mashup of the Egyptian demotic script, which was syllabic and required too much training for the everyday person, and the Greek alphabet, which was easy to learn but otherwise lacked important phonemes used by Egyptians. The fusion of the two, however, made an easy to learn alphabet that matched the spoken dialects of North Africa, where the Early Church thrived. Its use helped forge a collective identity and sense of solidarity amongst poor and downtrodden elements of society.

But by the second and third centuries Christianity was no longer the exclusive religion of slaves and servants. The floating class of mobile cosmopolitans were easy converts to the growing faith, as the ephemeral and impersonal nature of cities set their spiritual compasses spinning and yearning for a new identity. Almost unknowingly, Christianity became the religion of the network, spreading through the dendrites of the Cursus publicus and the stories of travelling merchants and evangelists. And over time, from this network emerged a hierarchy.

In both cities and rural backwaters from Gaul to Pontus, a newly invented caste of Christians called “Bishops” sprung up in around the middle third century and soon became part of the social fabric of the city; tying together both local and distant communities in a way the Roman state itself struggled to do. This power was maintained through activism; on a city level, Christians became a kind of emergency service, able to orchestrate food distribution and burials during plagues and natural disasters. Bishops became in effect lobbyists, who in alliance with communities of monks, wielded considerable social and political influence on a local and state level. It was an emergent, parallel power structure described by historian Hendrik Willem van Loon as a “supertheocracy”; the pragmatic outcome of the failures of the end-times to arrive.

“As soon as it became apparent that the end of the world was not at hand, that the death of Jesus was not to be followed immediately by the Last Judgement, and that Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of tears for a good long time, the need was felt for a more or less definite form of government.”

As the emergent Church gained more power and influence, so was the vilification of wealth gradually downgraded. In the late second century, Clement of Alexandria argued The Rich Man’s Salvation that, actually, wealth can be used for good or ill and was not in fact evil in and of itself. As it slowly gained material power, the socialistic origins of the faith were increasingly mythologised as something that existed amongst early Christian communities, and — importantly — ideals of extreme equality were bundled into the ambiguous “Kingdom of Heaven” in the days beyond the Second Coming. Inequality and hierarchy could be endured in the here-and-now if the payoff was just around the corner.

As Christianity spread, it coincided with a growing unease amongst devout followers of the old religion that the all-important act of sacrifice — so important to keep the gods on-side — was in decline. This was used to explain some of the poor luck that the Empire had been having around the same time. Similar anxieties gripped the regions of Greece who thought the ritual of their sacred groves and oracles — thought to have been conducted since the dawn of time — were accumulating errors through neglect, leading to natural disasters.

Festival of Pales by Joseph-Benoît Suvée, depicting the Roman ritual of animal sacrifice

In the year 250 CE, the Emperor Decius demanded that citizens across the Empire perform a sacrifice to the cult of the Emperor as a sign of loyalty. The Christians refused, which was perceived as a form of sedition and as a result mobs took to the streets to persecute them. Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria went into hiding in the Libyan desert and sent out messages in the Coptic script to help consolidate and organise Christian resistance, much as the Ayatollah Khomeini would do with cassette tapes in Iran over a thousand years later.

Rome’s run of bad luck continued. A decade after the Decian persecution Valerian suffered an unfortunate historical first by becoming the first Emperor to be taken prisoner by the Persians after losing to them at the Battle of Edessa. It was said his fate was to have been enslaved and used as a human footstool before being killed and stuffed as a trophy. Baring in mind that the Romans considered the Emperor divine, these did not indicate the gods were particularly amused. By the end of the third century, a new strongman, Diocletian took the reins of the Empire in an effort to turn things around, which he did militarily in a successful campaign against the Perians which resulted in him sacking their capital Ctesiphon.

After this triumph, he gathered rounds priests of the old gods — consultants basically — with the hope of forecasting the future of his reign. Their trusted predictive technology, the haruspex, failed to yield any meaningful predictions and blame was put on the presence of Christians in the royal court. This had a knock-on effect of Diocletian demanding sacrifices be made by everyone in the army, which in practical terms meant an early retirement for Christians, followed by all those in the state bureaucracy. Surrounded by anti-Christian hardliners, such as his co-Emperor Galerius, he claimed that it was “the greatest crime to undo what has been fixed and established by antiquity”. After consulting the oracle at Delphi in 302, he decided to launch a general persecution of Christians, which resulted in Churches being destroyed and their scriptures burned. Galerius pushed for them to be burned alive, and although Diocletian forbade this, fiery death did come to some unfortunate Bishops in the East. One member of the royal household suspected of treason, Gorgonius, was slowly boiled alive. For those seeking identity in oppression and glory in martyrdom, this was their hour.

Diocletian’s edicts were enforced unevenly across the Empire but resulted in the deaths of around three thousand people. This bloody persecution, however, was to be the last. For within a few decades, a seismic shift would sharply change imperial religious policy; and a revolution would be launched against the old gods themselves.