Veni, Vidi, Vici

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Romans but were afraid to ask

Peter Jones

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782390206
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Romans left a long-lasting legacy and their influence can still be seen all around us - from our calendar and coins, to our language and laws - but how much do we really know about them? Help is at hand in the form of Veni, Vidi, Vici, which tells the remarkable, and often surprising, story of the Romans and the most enduring empire in history.

Fusing a lively and entertaining narrative with rigorous research, Veni, Vidi, Vici breaks down each major period into a series of concise nuggets that provide a fascinating commentary on every aspect of the Roman world - from plebs to personalities, sauces to sexuality, games to gladiators, poets to punishments, mosaics to medicine and Catullus to Christianity.

Through the twists and turns of his 1250-year itinerary, Peter Jones is a friendly and clear-thinking guide. In this book he has produced a beguiling and entertaining introduction to the Romans, one that vividly brings to life the people who helped create the world we live in today.

XII

AD 1 – 430

TIMELINE

AD 64	Great Fire of Rome
AD 111	Pliny's letters to Trajan about Christians
AD 160–80	Persecution under Marcus Aurelius
AD 168	Jewish revolt led by Judas Maccabaeus
AD 235–8	Maximinus’ ‘no taxes for persecution’ offer
AD 248	Rome's millennium celebrations
AD 249	Decius decrees universal pagan sacrifice
AD 260–68	Gallienus emperor
AD 262	Church-state relations formalized
AD 302	Diocletian consults the Delphic oracle about Christianity
AD 311	Galerius’ ‘Edict of Toleration’
AD 312	Constantine's victory at Milvian Bridge: the chi-rho sign AD 322–3 Co-emperor Licinius restarts persecution
AD 325	Council of Nicaea
AD 360–63	Julian ‘the apostate’ emperor The Delphic oracle announces its own demise
AD 390	Theodosius I ex-communicated for slaughter of racing fans
AD 391	Theodosius bans all religions bar Christianity
AD 404	Jerome's ‘Vulgate’ Bible (in Latin)
c. AD 411	Augustine's City of God
c. AD 440	Simeon Stylites on his pillar in Aleppo
AD 470–544	Dionysius Exiguus, inventor of AD/ BC
AD 731	Bede uses AD/ BC for the first time

THE GROWING REVOLUTION

Church and state

Like all good pagans Romans acknowledged numerous gods and tolerated all kinds of cult practices. There was no general mandate from the emperor to suppress sects; it was simply expected that everyone (whatever their private beliefs) observed state religious ritual, especially worshipping the emperor. But Romans made Judaism an exception. In return, the Jews were prepared to live, uneasily at times, under the domination of an often insensitive alien power (c. AD 48, for instance, during the Passover, a Roman soldier in the Temple bared his backside to the crowd and farted. A riot ensued, the army was called in and 20– 30,000 Jews died, many crushed in the narrow streets as they tried to escape). Judaism was therefore a legal sect and the Romans left the Jews to deal with Christianity, one of its many offshoots.

However, as Christianity became more popular, the Roman authorities took a greater interest. Tacitus says that Nero decided to blame Christians for the Great Fire of Rome in 64 (see p. 247), while Suetonius says that Nero imposed punishments on Christians for their ‘new and dangerous superstition’. Christianity was deemed dangerous presumably because Christians refused to take the oath to the emperor and so acknowledge the ultimate authority of the Roman state. Pliny the Younger, as governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor (northern Turkey, c. 111–13), enjoyed a fascinating correspondence on the subject with the emperor Trajan.

Persecution of the Christians increased under Marcus Aurelius in the period 160–80. He was punctilious about the state worship of pagan gods and (like many others) he ascribed natural and military disasters to divine anger at those who rejected such rituals. Church leaders across the Empire were particular targets, pour encourager les autres. All this, paradoxically in Roman eyes, had the reverse effect on Christians, encouraging among them instead a desire for glorious martyrdom.

As Christianity grew and developed its own unique structures – though even by Constantine's time it can hardly have been more than 10 per cent of the Empire's population – the tide slowly began to turn. Spasmodic persecution resumed again in the third century, though Gallienus (260–68) briefly offered Christianity some protected status. In 262 relations between Christians and Gallienus came formally into being, when the emperor agreed that bishops in Egypt should have access to their churches and burial grounds; soon after, when a deposed bishop refused to leave his house, the emperor Aurelian gave permission for the Church in Rome and Italy to enforce his removal. Then, under Diocletian, came the last official, state-sanctioned effort to stamp out Christianity. Churches and scriptures were burned and there were executions and mutilations – more severe in the East than in the West. It was a failure.

Christianity went from strength to strength. On 30 April 311 Galerius (a co-emperor) issued his ‘Edict of Toleration’ and in 312 Constantine won his famous victory at the Milvian Bridge under the banner of the Christian god and became emperor, issuing his own edict a year later. When his co-emperor Licinius resumed persecuting the Christians in 322–3, Constantine defeated him in battle in 324. In 360–63 the emperor Julian ‘the Apostate’ attempted to revive paganism, but his early death ended that.

Constantine's achievement was to make Christianity a ‘virtue’ now required by emperors. As a result it became the official state religion and therefore an increasing political force in the world. Bishops had the same authority as provincial governors and could make laws. In February 391 the emperor Theodosius banned all other religions and set about dismantling pagan places of worship and ritual. Christianity was now supreme. But this raised the crucial question of authority: who ran the show? The Church versus state debate had begun, though the emperors initially reigned supreme. Furthermore, Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410 (p. 340), sending a shudder across the Empire. In response St Augustine composed his famous City of God, arguing that the attack was a heaven-sent punishment inflicted on a secular world, but of no ultimate relevance. The Church turned to persecuting its own ‘heretics’.

All this time the Church had been developing its own structures along the lines of the Roman Empire. The Pope, the bishop of Rome (the title ‘Pope’ was first used in the third century) was emperor, and dressed like one too; his bishops (successors to the apostles) were provincial governors; there were dioceses with vicars (vicarii) and the priests were local bigwigs. The historian Eusebius (c. 260–340) constructed a line of succession from the apostles to the Christianity of Constantine. The call for definitive, inspired scriptures to establish the final truth led to the canon we know today; and bishops and priests claimed the right to oversee interpretation of the scriptures too, as well as presiding over the Eucharist. By 404 Jerome produced from the Greek a Latin version of the Bible (the ‘Vulgate’), which eventually came to be seen by the Catholic Church as a divinely sanctioned ‘authorized version’ (p. 255).

Church architecture was revolutionized when Constantine became emperor. Early Christians had met in private houses, but huge buildings were now put up to hold large congregations. The model was not the pagan temple, which was designed simply to hold the statue of a god or goddess, while ritual worship took place at a sacrificial altar outside the temple. Instead, the Church turned for its model to the Roman basilica, the great hall with an apse, used across the Empire for commercial, military or legal purposes. It was a clever, synthesizing move.

However, there was little agreement as to what Christianity meant. Philosophical debates based on the scriptures raged, and sects within Christianity were constantly breaking away. But Constantine brought with him orthodoxy. The word for ‘philosophical school of thought’, hairesis (‘choice’), now became ‘heresy’ – error – and Constantine's bishops set about imposing their version of the Church's history thus far. The first ecumenical Church council of Nicaea (325) was a good example of how mainstream orthodoxy developed. The result was the Nicene Creed, still the basis of mainstream Christian liturgy.

THE PAGAN CONTEXT OF CHRISTIANITY

For ancient pagans it was not a matter of what you believed or felt, but what you did, i.e., how well you carried out the state and local rituals that would placate the gods. It has been called ‘performance-indexed piety’, and every aspect of pagan life was closely tied up with it. Ancient gods were attached to places and peoples. Horace talked of the god of the spring on his farm; Jupiter was god of the Romans. Rulers were descended from gods, e.g., Julius Caesar from Venus. When an emperor died he became a god, and sacrifices would be offered to him. Augustus got to be called a god while still alive (p. 254)! The gods were also associated with institutions (e.g., Dionysus was the Greek god of the theatre), so to be engaged in city life implied an association with the gods, ensuring that the city and the gods flourished. When the Romans besieged other cities, for instance, they ‘called out’ its gods, promising to maintain their (now threatened) cultic life if they won (and compare p. 366). Romans wanted to keep the gods – and their human worshippers – onside; and bringing new gods into the pantheon was an intelligent thing to do. In other words, religion was a fusion of ritual with the political, cultural, institutional and everyday life of society. That was the way the system was: you could not have one without the other.

So it was no wonder that it caused such outrage and upheaval when Christianity came along. An aeons-old traditional understanding of the nature of the relationship between gods and man was abandoned. People were ‘converted’ (an almost meaningless concept for pagans) to a monotheistic religion not of ritual but of creed, dogma and belief, little of it inextricably fused with Roman society's main concerns.

ADD ONE FOR AD O

The Christian BC /AD designation was invented in the sixth century AD. Since the Romans did not have zero (it was not introduced into the European numbering system until the eleventh century AD), there could be no AD 0 when the change took place from the Roman system to the Christian. So the sequence at the BC –AD change goes: 2 BC , 1 BC , AD 1, AD 2, etc. This always causes trouble. Because there is no Year 0, you have to add 1 to include the 0 to 1 move. So the 2,500th anniversary of the battle of Marathon (490 BC) is not 2010 (490 + 2010 = 2,500) but 490 + 2010 + 1 = 2011.

LITTLE DEN'S BIG DATE

Dionysius Exiguus (c. 470–544) or Little Dennis (a mark of his humility) is best known as the inventor of the BC /AD system. Until then years had been dated by the name of the (annual) Roman consuls, or the formula ‘X years after the foundation of Rome’ (in 753 BC), but Dionysius came up with the anno Domini (‘in the year of our Lord’) formula. Starting from the year in which he did the calculation – ‘the consulship of the Younger Probus [and Philoxenus]’ – he worked out (we have no idea how) that Jesus had been born 525 years earlier, i.e., making the date when he made his calculation, by our reckoning, 526. Jesus was not born on that date (AD 1), but never mind (p. 207). The system finally caught on in 731, when the great Northumbrian monk and historian (‘The Venerable’) Bede used it to date events in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. We are now advised to abandon BC and AD as too biased towards Christianity, and instead use Before Common Era (BCE) and Common Era (CE). But to whom is it common, and why?

PLINY ON CHRISTIANS

Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia (modern north-west Turkey) AD 110–12, received anonymous pamphlets naming troublesome Christians. In the absence of any legal precedents, he arrested the Christians and ordered them to invoke pagan gods, make offerings to the emperor's statue and revile the name of Christ. For the pagan Pliny this was entirely reasonable, but when the Christians refused, he saw it as a direct threat to Roman rule and had them executed. However, this matter clearly worried him, and he wrote to Trajan (emperor AD 98– 117) for advice: in particular, should he punish people for having been Christians? Trajan added three important riders. Christians must not be hunted down (i.e., they were not state criminals); if they repented, they must be forgiven whatever their past conduct; and anonymous pamphlets must play no part in the proceedings. In other words, no witch hunts: the full rigour of the law must be applied. But those who put themselves outside the law were shown no mercy, whatever their excuses. For Romans, it was a power issue: what was owed to state-sanctioned ritual?

PERSECUTING CHRISTIANS: THE EARLY YEARS

For the first 200 years of Christianity's existence, there were no imperial edicts commanding the worldwide persecution of Christians (see Decius on p. 364). There were local outbreaks of strong anti-Christian feelings, usually for refusing to carry out state religious rituals or for allegations of drinking the blood of babies and so on, but these were not the norm. Indeed, Maximinus the Thracian (emperor 235–8) had to promise some people in the Empire freedom from taxes provided they agreed to persecute Christians! The result was that in the Empire's broadly live-and-let-live religious world, where multitudes of different gods were freely available for worship, Christianity grew quietly. Just one sect among many, it was obscure enough to be ignored for the most part. Public churches began appearing, and Christians could be found at all levels of imperial administration.

NOAH WAY

Apamea (in modern Syria) was a major Roman trading post, nicknamed kibôtos, ‘money chest’. But kibôtos is also Greek for ‘ark’ and from the third century onwards the town starting minting coins featuring Noah's Ark. Why? Because Christians in Apamea had argued that Apamea was where Noah's Ark had come to rest. This made it a pl...