See the book at Amazon<\/a><\/p>\n—<\/p>\n
I. THE WAR OF CHURCH AND STATE: A.D. 64-311 <\/p>\n
IN pre-Christian days the Roman government had for the most part allowed to the rivals of orthodox paganism a tolerance which they in turn had shown to the official and imperial cults; nothing was demanded from the adherents of new faiths except an occasional gesture of adoration to the gods and head of the state. The emperors were piqued to find that of all the heretics under their rule only the Christians and the Jews refused to join in honoring their genius. The burning of incense before a statue of the emperor had become a sign and affirmation of loyalty to the Empire, like the oath of allegiance required for citizenship today. On its side the Church resented the Roman idea that religion was subordinate to the state; it saw in emperor-worship an act of polytheism and idolatry, and instructed its followers to refuse it at any cost. The Roman government concluded that Christianity was a radical- perhaps a communist- movement, subtly designed to overthrow the established order.<\/p>\n
Before Nero the two forces had found it possible to live together without blows. The law had exempted the Jews from emperor-worship, and the Christians, at first confused with the Jews, were granted the same privilege. But the execution of Peter and Paul, and the burning of Christians to light up Nero’s games, turned this mutual and contemptuous tolerance into unceasing hostility and intermittent war. We cannot wonder that after such provocation the Christians turned their full armory against Rome- denounced its immorality and idolatry, ridiculed its gods, rejoiced in its calamities, and predicted its early fall. In the ardor of a faith made intolerant by intolerance, Christians declared that all who had had a chance to accept Christ and had refused would be condemned to eternal torments; many of them foretold the same fate for all the pre-Christian or non-Christian world; some excepted Socrates. In reply, pagans called the Christians “dregs of the people” and “insolent barbarians,” accused them of “hatred of the human race,” and ascribed the misfortunes of the Empire to the anger of pagan deities whose Christian revilers had been allowed to live. A thousand slanderous legends arose on either side. Christians were charged with demonic magic, secret immorality, drinking human blood at the Paschal feast, and worshiping an ass. But the conflict was profounder than mere pugnacity. Pagan civilization was founded upon the state, Christian civilization upon religion. To a Roman his religion was part of the structure and ceremony of government, and his morality culminated in patriotism; to a Christian his religion was something apart from and superior to political society; his highest allegiance belonged not to Caesar but to Christ. Tertullian laid down the revolutionary principle that no man need obey a law that he deemed unjust. The Christian revered his bishop, even his priest, far above the Roman magistrate; he submitted his legal troubles with fellow Christians to his church authorities rather than to the officials of the state. The detachment of the Christian from earthly affairs seemed to the pagan a flight from civic duty, a weakening of the national fiber and will. Tertullian advised Christians to refuse military service; and that a substantial number of them followed his counsel is indicated by Celsus’ appeal to end this refusal, and Origen’s reply that though Christians will not fight for the Empire they will pray for it. Christians were exhorted by their leaders to avoid non-Christians, to shun their festival games as barbarous, and their theaters as stews of obscenity. Marriage with a non-Christian was forbidden. Christian slaves were accused of introducing discord into the family by converting their masters’ children or wives; Christianity was charged with breaking up the home.
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\n The opposition to the new religion came rather from the people than from the state. The magistrates were often men of culture and tolerance; but the mass of the pagan population resented the aloofness, superiority, and certainty of the Christians, and called upon the authorities to punish these “atheists” for insulting the gods. Tertullian notes “the general hatred felt for us.” From the time of Nero Roman law seems to have branded the profession of Christianity as a capital offense; but under most of the emperors this ordinance was enforced with deliberate negligence. If accused, a Christian could usually free himself by offering incense to a statue of the emperor; thereafter he was apparently allowed to resume the quiet practice of his faith. Christians who refused this obeisance might be imprisoned, or flogged, or exiled, or condemned to the mines, or, rarely, put to death. Domitian seems to have banished some Christians from Rome; but “being in some degree human,” says Tertullian, “he soon stopped what he had begun, and restored the exiles.” Pliny enforced the law with the officiousness of an amateur (111), if we may judge from his letter to Trajan: <\/p>\n
The method I have observed toward those who have been denounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be executed…. The temples, which had been almost deserted, begin now to be frequented… and there is a general demand for sacrificial animals, which for some time past have met with but few purchasers.<\/p>\n
To which Trajan replied:<\/p>\n
The method you have pursued, my dear Pliny, in sifting the cases of those denounced to you as Christians is eminently proper…. No search should be made for these people; when they are denounced and found guilty they must be punished; but where the accused party denies that he is a Christian, and gives proof… by adoring our gods, he shall be pardoned…. Information without the accuser’s name subscribed must not be admitted in evidence against anyone. <\/p>\n
The passage here italicized suggests that Trajan only reluctantly carried out a pre-existing statute. Nevertheless, we hear of two prominent martyrs in his principate: Simeon, head of the church of Jerusalem, and Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch; presumably there were others of less fame.<\/p>\n
Hadrian, a skeptic open to all ideas, instructed his appointees to give the Christians the benefit of every doubt. Being more religious, Antoninus allowed more persecution. At Smyrna the populace demanded of the “Asiarch” Philip that he enforce the law; he complied by having eleven Christians executed in the amphitheater (155). The bloodthirst of the crowd was aroused rather than assuaged; it clamored for the death of Bishop Polycarp, a saintly patriarch of eighty-six years, who was said in his youth to have known Saint John. Roman soldiers found the old man in a suburban retreat, and brought him unresisting before the Asiarch at the games. Philip pressed him: “Take the oath, revile Christ, and I will let you go.” Polycarp, says the most ancient of the Acts of the Martyrs, replied: “For eighty-six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong; how then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” The crowd cried out that he should be burned alive. The flames, says the pious document, refused to burn him, “but he was within them as bread that is being baked; and we perceived such a fragrant smell as might come from incense or other costly spices. At length the lawless men commanded an executioner to stab him. When he did this there came out a dove, and so much blood that the fire was quenched, and all the crowd marveled.”
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\n The persecutions were renewed under the saintly Aurelius. When famine, flood, pestilence, and war overwhelmed a once happy reign, the conviction spread that these evils were due to neglect and denial of the Roman gods. Aurelius shared the public terror, or yielded to it. In 177 he issued a rescript ordering the punishment of sects that caused disturbances by “exciting the ill-balanced minds of men” with new winds of doctrine. In that same year, at Vienne and Lyons, the pagan populace arose in fury against the Christians, and stoned them whenever they dared to stir from their homes. The imperial legate ordered the arrest of the leading Christians of Lyons. Bishop Pothinus, ninety years old, died in jail from the effects of torture. A messenger was sent to Rome to ask the advice of the Emperor as to the treatment of the remaining prisoners. Marcus replied that those who denied Christianity should be freed, but those who professed it should be put to death according to the law. The annual festival of the Augustalia was now to be celebrated in Lyons, and delegates from all Gaul crowded the provincial capital. At the height of the games the accused Christians were brought to the amphitheater and were questioned. Those who recanted were dismissed; forty-seven who persisted were put to death with a variety and barbarity of tortures equaled only by the Inquisition. Attalus, second to Pothinus in the Christian community, was forced to sit on a chair of red-hot iron and roast to death. Blandina, a slave girl, was tortured all day, then bound up in a bag, and thrown into the arena to be gored to death by a bull. Her silent fortitude led many Christians to believe that Christ made his martyrs insensitive to pain; the same result might have come from ecstasy and fear. “The Christian,” said Tertullian, “even when condemned to die, gives thanks.” Under Commodus the persecutions waned. Septimius Severus renewed them, even to the point of making baptism a crime. In 203 many Christians suffered martyrdom in Carthage. One of them, a young mother named Perpetua, left a touching account of her days in prison, and her father’s prostrate pleas that she should renounce Christianity. She and another young mother were tossed and gored by a bull; we have an indication of the anesthetic effect of fear and trance in her later query, “When are we to be tossed?” Story tells how she guided to her throat the dagger of the reluctant gladiator who had to kill her. The Syrian empresses who followed Septimius had little concern for the Roman gods, and gave Christianity a careless toleration. Under Alexander Severus peace seemed established among all the rival faiths.<\/p>\n
The renewal of the barbarian attacks ended this truce. To understand the persecution under Declus (or Aurelius) we must imagine a nation in the full excitement of war, frightened by serious defeats, and expecting hostile invasion. In 249 a wave of religious emotion swept the Empire; men and women flocked to the temples and besieged the gods with prayers. Amid this fever of patriotism and fear the Christians stood apart, still resenting and discouraging military service, scorning the gods, and interpreting the collapse of the Empire as the prophesied prelude to the destruction of “Babylon” and the return of Christ. Using the mood of the people as an opportunity to strengthen national enthusiasm and unity, Decius issued an edict requiring every inhabitant of the realm to offer a propitiatory act of homage to the gods of Rome. Apparently Christians were not asked to abjure their own faith, but were commanded to join in the universal supplicatio to the deities who, the populace believed, had so often saved imperiled Rome. Most Christians complied; in Alexandria, according to its Bishop Dionysius, “the apostasy was universal”; it was likewise in Carthage and Smyrna; probably these Christians considered the supplicatio a patriotic formality. But the bishops of Jerusalem and Antioch died in jail, and the bishops of Rome and Toulouse were put to death (250). Hundreds of Roman Christians were crowded into dungeons; some were beheaded, some were burned at the stake, a few were given to the beasts in holiday festival. After a year the persecution abated; and by Easter of 251 it was practically at an end. Six years later Valerian, in another crisis of invasion and terror, ordered that “all persons must conform to the Roman ceremonials,” and forbade any Christian assemblage. Pope Sixtus II resisted, and was put to death with four of his deacons. Bishop Cyprian of Carthage was beheaded, the bishop of Tarragona was burned alive. In 261, after the Persians had removed Valerian from the scene, Gallienus published the first edict of toleration, recognizing Christianity as a permitted religion, and ordering that property taken from Christians should be restored to them. Minor persecutions occurred in the next forty years, but for the most part these were for Christianity decades of unprecedented calm and rapid growth. In the chaos and terror of the third century men fled from the weakened state to the consolations of religion, and found them more abundantly in Christianity than in its rivals. The Church made rich converts now, built costly cathedrals, and allowed its adherents to share in the joys of this world. The odium theologicum subsided among the people; Christians intermingled more freely with pagans, even married them. The Oriental monarchy of Diocletian seemed destined to consolidate religious as well as political security and peace. Galerius, however, saw in Christianity the last obstacle to absolute rule, and urged his chief to complete the Roman restoration by restoring the Roman gods. Diocletian hesitated; he was averse to needless risks, and estimated more truly than Galerius the magnitude of the task. But one day, at an imperial sacrifice, the Christians made the sign of the cross to ward off evil demons. When the augurs failed to find on the livers of the sacrificed animals the marks that they had hoped to interpret, they blamed the presence of profane and unbelieving persons. Diocletian ordered that all in attendance should offer sacrifice to the gods or be flogged, and that all soldiers in the army should similarly conform or be dismissed (302). Strange to say, Christian writers agreed with the pagan priests: the prayers of the Christian, said Lactantius, kept the Roman gods at a distance; and Bishop Dionysius had written to the same effect a generation before. Galerius at every opportunity argued the need of religious unity as a support to the new monarchy; and at last Diocletian yielded. In February, 303, the four rulers decreed the destruction of all Christian churches, the burning of Christian books, the dissolution of Christian congregations, the confiscation of their property, the exclusion of Christians from public office, and the punishment of death for Christians detected in religious assembly. A band of soldiers inaugurated the persecution by burning to the ground the cathedral at Nicomedia. The Christians were now numerous enough to retaliate. A revolutionary movement broke out in Syria, and in Nicomedia incendiaries twice set fire to Diocletian’s palace. Galerius accused the Christians of the arson; they accused him; hundreds of Christians were arrested and tortured, but the guilt was never fixed. In September Diocletian ordered that imprisoned Christians who would worship the Roman gods should be freed, but that those who refused should be subjected to every torture known to Rome. Infuriated by scornful resistance, he directed all provincial magistrates to seek out every Christian, and use any method to compel him to appease the gods. Then, probably glad to leave this miserable enterprise to his successors, he resigned.
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\n Maximian carried out the edict with military thoroughness in Italy. Galerius, become Augustus, gave every encouragement to the persecution in the East. The roll of martyrs was increased in every part of the Empire except Gaul and Britain, where Constantius contented himself with burning a few churches. Eusebius assures us, presumably with the hyperbole of indignation, that men were flogged till the flesh hung from their bones, or their flesh was scraped to the bone with shells; salt or vinegar was poured upon the wounds; the flesh was cut off bit by bit and fed to waiting animals; or bound to crosses, men were eaten piecemeal by starved beasts. Some victims had their fingers pierced with sharp reeds under the nails; some had their eyes gouged out; some were suspended by a hand or a foot; some had molten lead poured down their throats; some were beheaded, or crucified, or beaten to death with clubs; some were torn apart by being tied to the momentarily bent branches of trees. We have no pagan narrative of these events. The persecution continued for eight years, and brought death to approximately 1500 Christians, orthodox or heretic, and diverse sufferings to countless more. Thousands of Christians recanted; tradition said that even Marcellinus, Bishop of Rome, denied his faith under duress of terror and pain. But most of the persecuted stood firm; and the sight or report of heroic fidelity under torture strengthened the faith of the wavering and won new members for the hunted congregations. As the brutalities multiplied, the sympathy of the pagan population was stirred; the opinion of good citizens found courage to express itself against the most ferocious oppression in Roman history. Once the people had urged the state to destroy Christianity; now the people stood aloof from the government, and many pagans risked death to hide or protect Christians until the storm should pass. In 311 Galerius, suffering from a mortal illness, convinced of failure, and implored by his wife to make his peace with the undefeated God of the Christians, promulgated an edict of toleration, recognizing Christianity as a lawful religion and asking the prayers of the Christians in return for “our most gentle clemency.” <\/p>\n
The Diocletian persecution was the greatest test and triumph of the Church. It weakened Christianity for a time through the natural defection of adherents who had joined it, or grown up, during a half century of unmolested prosperity. But soon the defaulters were doing penance and pleading for readmission to the fold. Accounts of the loyalty of martyrs who had died, or of “confessors” who had suffered, for the faith were circulated from community to community; and these Acta Martyrum, intense with exaggeration and fascinating with legend, played a historic role in awakening or confirming Christian belief. “The blood of martyrs,” said Tertullian, “is seed.” There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won. <\/p>\n
II. THE RISE OF CONSTANTINE <\/p>\n
Diocletian, peaceful in his Dalmatian palace, saw the failure of both the persecution and the tetrarchy. Seldom had the Empire witnessed such confusion as followed his abdication. Galerius prevailed upon Constantius to let him appoint Severus and Maximinus Daza as “Caesars” (305). At once the principle of heredity asserted its claims: Maxentius, son of Maximian, wished to succeed his father’s authority, and a like resolution fired Constantine. Flavius Valerius Constantinus had begun life at Naissus in Moesia (272?) as the illegitimate son of Constantius by his legal concubine Helena, a barmaid from Bithynia. On becoming a “Caesar,” Constantius was required by Diocletian to put away Helena and to take Maximian’s stepdaughter Theodora as his wife. Constantine received only a meager education. He took up soldiering early, and proved his valor in the wars against Egypt and Persia. Galerius, on succeeding Diocletian, kept the young officer near him as a hostage for the good behavior of Constantius. When the latter asked Galerius to send the youth to him Galerius procrastinated craftily; but Constantine escaped from his watchers, and rode night and day across Europe to join his father at Boulogne and share in a British campaign. The Gallic army, deeply loyal to the humane Constantius, came to love his handsome, brave, and energetic son; and when the father died at York (306), the troops acclaimed Constantine not merely as “Caesar” but as Augustus – emperor. He accepted the lesser title, excusing himself on the ground that his life would be unsafe without an army at his back. Galerius, too distant to intervene, reluctantly recognized him as a “Caesar.” Constantine fought successfully against the invading Franks, and fed the beasts of the Gallic amphitheaters with barbarian kings.
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\n Meanwhile in Rome the Praetorian Guard, eager to restore the ancient capital to leadership, hailed Maxentius as emperor (306). Severus descended from Milan to attack him; Maximian, to confound the confusion, returned to the purple at his son’s request, and joined in the campaign; Severus was deserted by his troops and put to death (307). To help himself face the growing chaos, the aging Galerius appointed a new Augustus – Flavius Licinius; hearing which, Constantine assumed a like dignity (307). A year later Maximinus Daza adopted the same title, so that in place of the two Augusti of Diocletian’s plan there were now six; no one cared to be merely “Caesar.” Maxentius quarreled with his father; Maximian went to Gaul to seek Constantine’s aid; while the latter fought Germans on the Rhine, Maximian tried to replace him as commander of the Gallic armies; Constantine marched across Gaul, besieged the usurper in Marseilles, captured him, and granted him the courtesy of suicide (310).<\/p>\n
The death of Galerius (311) removed the last barrier between intrigue and war. Maximinus plotted with Maxentius to overthrow Licinius and Constantine, who conspired to overthrow them. Taking the initiative, Constantine crossed the Alps, defeated an army near Turin, and advanced upon Rome with a celerity of movement, and a restraining discipline of his troops, that recalled the march of Caesar from the Rubicon. On October 27, 312, he met the forces of Maxentius at Saxa Rubra (Red Rocks) nine miles north of Rome; and by superior strategy compelled Maxentius to fight with his back to the Tiber, and no retreat possible except over the Mulvian Bridge. On the afternoon before the battle, says Eusebius, Constantine saw a flaming cross in the sky, with the Greek words en toutoi nika – “in this sign conquer.” Early the next morning, according to Eusebius and Lactantius, Constantine dreamed that a voice commanded him to have his soldiers mark upon their shields the letter X with a line drawn through it and curled around the top- the symbol of Christ. On arising he obeyed, and then advanced into the forefront of battle behind a standard (known henceforth as the labarum ) carrying the initials of Christ interwoven with a cross. As Maxentius displayed the Mithraic-Aurellan banner of the Unconquerable Sun, Constantine cast in his lot with the Christians, who were numerous in his army, and made the engagement a turning point in the history of religion. To the worshipers of Mithras in Constantine’s forces the cross could give no offense, for they had long fought under a standard bearing a Mithraic cross of light. In any case Constantine won the battle of the Mulvian Bridge, and Maxentius perished in the Tiber with thousands of his troops. The victor entered Rome the welcomed and undisputed master of the West.<\/p>\n
Early in 313 Constantine and Licinius met at Milan to co-ordinate their rule. To consolidate Christian support in all provinces, Constantine and Licinius issued an “Edict of Milan,” confirming the religious toleration proclaimed by Galerius, extending it to all religions, and ordering the restoration of Christian properties seized during the recent persecutions. After this historic declaration, which in effect conceded the defeat of paganism, Constantine returned to the defense of Gaul, and Licinius moved eastward to overwhelm Maximinus (313). The death of Maximinus shortly afterward left Constantine and Licinius the unchallenged rulers of the Empire. Licinius married Constantine’s sister, and a war-weary people rejoiced at the prospect of peace.<\/p>\n
But neither of the Augusti had quite abandoned the hope of undivided supremacy. In 314 their mounting enmity reached the point of war. Constantine invaded Pannonia, defeated Licinius, and exacted the surrender of all Roman Europe except Thrace. Licinius revenged himself upon Constantine’s Christian supporters by renewing the persecution in Asia and Egypt. He excluded Christians from his palace at Nicomedia, required every soldier to adore the pagan gods, forbade the simultaneous attendance of both sexes at Christian worship, and at last prohibited all Christian services within city walls. Disobedient Christians lost their positions, their citizenship, their property, their liberty, or their lives. Constantine watched for an opportunity not only to succor the Christians of the East, but to add the East to his realm. When barbarians invaded Thrace, and Licinius failed to move against them, Constantine led his army from Thessalonica to the rescue of Licinius’ province. After the barbarians were driven back Licinius protested Constantine’s entry into Thrace; and as neither ruler desired peace, war was renewed. The defender of Christianity, with 130,000 men, met the defender of paganism, with 160,000 men, first at Adrianople and then at Chrysopolis (Scutari), won, and became sole emperor (323). Licinius surrendered on a promise of pardon; but in the following year he was executed on the charge that he had resumed his intrigues. Constantine recalled the Christian exiles, and restored to all “confessors” their lost privileges and property. While still proclaiming liberty of worship for all, he now definitely declared himself a Christian, and invited his subjects to join him in embracing the new faith.
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\n III. CONSTANTINE AND CHRISTIANITY <\/p>\n
Was his conversion sincere- was it ail act of religious belief, or a consummate stroke of political wisdom? Probably the latter. His mother Helena had turned to Christianity when Constantius divorced her; presumably she had acquainted her son with the excellences of the Christian way; and doubtless he had been impressed by the invariable victory that had crowned his arms under the banner and cross of Christ. But only a skeptic would have made so subtle a use of the religious feelings of humanity. The Historia Augusta quotes him as saying, “it is Fortuna that makes a man emperor”- though this was a bow to modesty rather than to chance. In his Gallic court he had surrounded himself with pagan scholars and philosophers. After his conversion he seldom conformed to the ceremonial requirements of Christian worship. His letters to Christian bishops make it clear that he cared little for the theological differences that agitated Christendom- though he was willing to suppress dissent in the interests of imperial unity. Throughout his reign he treated the bishops as his political aides; he summoned them, presided over their councils, and agreed to enforce whatever opinion their majority should formulate. A real believer would have been a Christian first and a statesman afterward; with Constantine it was the reverse. Christianity was to him a means, not an end.<\/p>\n
He had seen in his lifetime the failure of three persecutions; and it was not lost upon him that Christianity had grown despite them. Its adherents were still very much in the minority; but they were relatively united, brave, and strong, while the pagan majority was divided among many creeds, and included a dead weight of simple souls without conviction or influence. Christians were especially numerous in Rome under Maxentius, and in the East under Licinius; Constantine’s support of Christianity was worth a dozen legions to him in his wars against these men. He was impressed by the comparative order and morality of Christian conduct, the bloodless beauty of Christian ritual, the obedience of Christians to their clergy, their humble acceptance of life’s inequalities in the hope of happiness beyond the grave; perhaps this new religion would purify Roman morals, regenerate marriage and the family, and allay the fever of class war. The Christians, despite bitter oppression, had rarely revolted against the state; their teachers had inculcated submission to the civil powers, and had taught the divine right of kings. Constantine aspired to an absolute monarchy; such a government would profit from religious support; the hierarchical discipline and ecumenical authority of the Church seemed to offer a spiritual correlate for monarchy. Perhaps that marvelous organization of bishops and priests could become an instrument of pacification, unification, and rule? Nevertheless, in a world still preponderantly pagan, Constantine had to feel his way by cautious steps. He continued to use vague monotheistic language that any pagan could accept. During the earlier years of his supremacy he carried out patiently the ceremonial required of him as pontifex maximus of the traditional cult; he restored pagan temples, and ordered the taking of the auspices. He used pagan as well as Christian rites in dedicating Constantinople. He used pagan magic formulas to protect crops and heal disease. Gradually, as his power grew more secure, he favored Christianity more openly. After 317 his coins dropped one by one their pagan effigies, until by 323 they bore only neutral inscriptions. A legal text of his reign, questioned but not disproved, gave Christian bishops the authority of judges in their dioceses; other laws exempted Church realty from taxation, made Christian associations juridical persons, allowed them to own land and receive bequests, and assigned the property of intestate martyrs to the Church. Constantine gave money to needy congregations, built several churches in Constantinople and elsewhere, and forbade the worship of images in the new capital. Forgetting the Edict of Milan, he prohibited the meetings of heretical sects, and finally ordered the destruction of their conventicles. He gave his sons an orthodox Christian education, and financed his mother’s Christian philanthropies. The Church rejoiced in blessings beyond any expectation. Eusebius broke out into orations that were songs of gratitude and praise; and all over the Empire Christians gathered in festal thanksgiving for the triumph of their God. Three clouds softened the brilliance of this “cloudless day”: the monastic secession, the Donatist schism, the Arian heresy. In the interval between the Decian and the Diocletian persecution the Church had become the richest religious organization in the Empire, and had moderated its attacks upon wealth. Cyprian complained that his parishioners were mad about money, that Christian women painted their faces, that bishops held lucrative offices of state, made fortunes, lent money at usurious interest, and denied their faith at the first sign of danger. Eusebius mourned that priests quarreled violently in their competition for ecclesiastical preferment. While Christianity converted the world, the world converted Christianity, and displayed the natural paganism of mankind. Christian monasticism arose as a protest against this mutual adjustment of the spirit and the flesh. A minority wished to avoid any indulgence of human appetite, and to continue the early Christian absorption in thoughts of eternal life. Following the custom of the Cynics, some of these ascetics renounced all possessions, donned the ragged robe of the philosopher, and subsisted on alms. A few, like Paul the Hermit, went to live as solitaries in the Egyptian desert. About 275 an Egyptian monk, Anthony, began a quarter century of isolated existence first in a tomb, then in an abandoned mountain castle, then in a rock-hewn desert cell. There he struggled nightly with frightful visions and pleasant dreams, and overcame them all; until at last his reputation for sanctity filled all Christendom, and peopled the desert with emulating eremites. In 325 Pachomius, feeling that solitude was selfishness, gathered anchorites into an abbey at Tabenne in Egypt, and founded that cenobitic, or community, monasticism which was to have its most influential development in the West. The Church opposed the monastic movement for a time, and then accepted it as a necessary balance to its increasing preoccupation with government.
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\n Within a year after Constantine’s conversion the Church was torn by a schism that might have ruined it in the very hour of victory. Donatus, Bishop of Carthage, supported by a priest of like name and temper, insisted that Christian bishops who had surrendered the Scriptures to the pagan police during the persecutions had forfeited their office and powers; that baptisms or ordinations performed by such bishops were null and void; and that the validity of sacraments depended in part upon the spiritual state of the ministrant. When the Church refused to adopt this stringent creed, the Donatists set up rival bishops wherever the existing prelate failed to meet their tests. Constantine, who had thought of Christianity as a unifying force, was dismayed by the chaos and violence that ensued, and was presumably not unmoved by the occasional alliance of Donatists with radical movements among the African peasantry. He called a council of bishops at Arles (314), confirmed its denunciation of the Donatists, ordered the schismatics to return to the Church, and decreed that recalcitrant congregations should lose their property and their civil rights (316). Five years later, in a momentary reminiscence of the Milan edict, he withdrew these measures, and gave the Donatists a scornful toleration. The schism continued till the Saracens overwhelmed orthodox and heretic alike in the conquest of Africa.<\/p>\n
In those same years Alexandria saw the rise of the most challenging heresy in the history of the Church. About 318 a priest from the Egyptian town of Baucalis startled his bishop with strange opinions about the nature of Christ. A learned Catholic historian describes him generously:<\/p>\n
Arius… was tall and thin, of melancholy look, and an aspect that showed traces of his austerities. He was known to be an ascetic, as could be seen from his costume- a short tunic without sleeves, under a scarf that served as a cloak. His manner of speaking was gentle; his addresses were persuasive. The consecrated virgins, who were numerous in Alexandria, held him in great esteem; and he counted many stanch supporters among the higher clergy. <\/p>\n
Christ, said Arius, was not one with the Creator, he was rather the Logos, the first and highest of all created beings. Bishop Alexander protested, Arius persisted. If, he argued, the Son had been begotten of the Father, it must have been in time; the Son therefore could not be coeternal with the Father. Furthermore, if Christ was created, it must have been from nothing, not from the Father’s substance; Christ was not “consubstantial” with the Father. The Holy Spirit was begotten by the Logos, and was still less God than the Logos. We see in these doctrines the continuity of ideas from Plato through the Stoics, Philo, Plotinus, and Origen to Arius; Platonism, which had so deeply influenced Christian theology, was now in conflict with the Church. Bishop Alexander was shocked not only by these views but by their rapid spread even among the clergy. He called a council of Egyptian bishops at Alexandria, persuaded it to unfrock Arius and his followers, and sent an account of the proceedings to other bishops. Some of these objected; many priests sympathized with Arius; throughout the Asiatic provinces clergy as well as laity divided on the issue, and made the cities ring with such “tumult and disorder… that the Christian religion,” says Eusebius, “afforded a subject of profane merriment to the pagans, even in their theaters.” Constantine, coming to Nicomedia after overthrowing Licinius, heard the story from its bishop. He sent both Alexander and Arius a personal appeal to imitate the calm of philosophers, to reconcile their differences peaceably, or at least to keep their debates from the public ear. The letter, preserved by Eusebius, clearly reveals Constantine’s lack of theology, and the political purpose of his religious policy.
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\nI had proposed to lead back to a single form the ideas which all people conceive of the Deity; for I feel strongly that if I could induce men to unite on that subject, the conduct of public affairs would be considerably eased. But alas! I hear that there are more disputes among you than recently in Africa. The cause seems to be quite trifling, and unworthy of such fierce contests. You, Alexander, wished to know what your priests were thinking on a point of law, even on a portion only of a question in itself entirely devoid of importance; and you, Arius, if you had such thoughts, should have kept silence…. There was no need to make these questions public… since they are problems that idleness alone raises, and whose only use is to sharpen men’s wits… these are silly actions worthy of inexperienced children, and not of priests or reasonable man. <\/p>\n
The letter had no effect. To the Church the question of the “consubstantiality” ( homoousia ) as against the mere similarity ( homoiousia ) of the Son and the Father was vital both theologically and politically. If Christ was not God, the whole structure of Christian doctrine would begin to crack; and if division were permitted on this question, chaos of belief might destroy the unity and authority of the Church, and therefore its value as an aide to the state. As the controversy spread, setting the Greek East aflame, Constantine resolved to end it by calling the first ecumenical- universal- council of the Church. He summoned all bishops to meet in 325 at Bithynian Nicaea, near his capital Nicomedia, and provided funds for all their expenses. Not less than 318 bishops came, “attended” says one of them, “by a vast concourse of the lower clergy”: the statement reveals the immense growth of the Church. Most of the bishops were from the Eastern provinces; many Western dioceses ignored the controversy; and Pope Silvester I, detained by illness, was content to be represented by some priests. The Council met in the hall of an imperial palace. Constantine presided and opened the proceedings by a brief appeal to the bishops to restore the unity of the Church. He “listened patiently to the debates,” reports Eusebius, “moderated the violence of the contending parties,” and himself joined in the argument. Arius reaffirmed his view that Christ was a created being, not equal to the Father, but “divine only by participation.” Clever questioners forced him to admit that if Christ was a creature, and had had a beginning, he could change; and that if he could change he might pass from virtue to vice. The answers were logical, honest, and suicidal. Athanasius, the eloquent and pugnacious archdeacon whom Alexander had brought with him as a theological sword, made it clear that if Christ and the Holy Spirit were not of one substance with the Father, polytheism would triumph. He conceded the difficulty of picturing three distinct persons in one God, but argued that reason must bow to the mystery of the Trinity. All but seventeen of the bishops agreed with him, and signed a statement expressing his view. The supporters of Arius agreed to sign if they might add one iota, changing homoousion to homoiousion. The Council refused, and issued with the Emperor’s approval the following creed: <\/p>\n
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible or invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten… not made, being of one essence ( homoousion ) with the Father… who for us men and our salvation came down and was made flesh, was made man, suffered, rose again the third day, ascended into heaven, and comes to judge the quick and the dead…. <\/p>\n
Only five bishops, finally only two, refused to sign this formula. These two, with the unrepentant Arius, were anathematized by the Council and exiled by the Emperor. An imperial edict ordered that all books by Arius should be burned, and made the concealment of such a book punishable with death.<\/p>\n
Constantine celebrated the conclusion of the Council with a royal dinner to all the assembled bishops, and then dismissed them with the request that they should not tear one another to pieces. He was mistaken in thinking that the controversy was ended, or that he himself would not change his view of it, but he was right in believing that he had struck a great blow for the unity of the Church. The Council signalized the conviction of the ecclesiastical majority that the organization and survival of the Church required a certain fixity of doctrine; and in final effect it achieved that practical unanimity of basic belief which gave the medieval Church its Catholic name. At the same time it marked the replacement of paganism with Christianity as the religious expression and support of the Roman Empire, and committed Constantine to a more definite alliance with Christianity than ever before. A new civilization, based on a new religion, would now rise over the ruins of an exhausted culture and a dying creed. The Middle Ages had begun.
\n
\n IV. CONSTANTINE AND CIVILIZATION <\/p>\n
A year after the Council Constantine dedicated, amid the desolation of Byzantium, a new city which he termed Nova Roma, and which posterity called by his name. In 330 he turned his back upon both Rome and Nicomedia, and made Constantinople his capital. There he surrounded himself with the impressive pomp of an Oriental court, feeling that its psychological influence upon army and people would make its expensive pageantry a subtle economy in government. He protected the army with able diplomacy and arms, tempered despotism with humane decrees, and lent his aid to letters and the arts. He encouraged the schools at Athens, and founded at Constantinople a new university where state-paid professors taught Greek and Latin, literature and philosophy, rhetoric and law, and trained officials for the Empire. He confirmed and extended the privileges of physicians and teachers in all provinces. Provincial governors were instructed to establish schools of architecture, and to draw students to them with divers privileges and rewards. Artists were exempted from civic obligations, so that they might have time to learn their art thoroughly and transmit it to their sons. The art treasures of the Empire were drawn upon to make Constantinople an elegant capital.<\/p>\n
In Rome the architectural works of this period were inaugurated by Maxentius. He began (306), and Constantine finished, an immense basilica that marked the climax of classical architecture in the West. Adapting the structure of the great baths, this edifice covered an area 330 by 250 feet. Its central hall, 114 by 82 feet, was roofed by three cross vaults of concrete 120 feet high, partly supported by eight broad piers faced with fluted Corinthian columns sixty feet tall. Its pavement was of colored marble; its bays were peopled with statuary; and the walls of these bays were prolonged above their roofs to serve as elevated buttresses for the central vaults. Gothic and Renaissance architects found much instruction in these vaults and buttresses. Bramante, designing St. Peter’s, planned to “raise the Pantheon over the Basilica of Constantine”- i.e., to crown a spacious nave with a massive dome.<\/p>\n
The first Christian emperor built many churches in Rome, probably including the original form of San Lorenzo outside the Walls. To celebrate his victory at the Mulvian Bridge he raised in 315 the arch that still towers over the Via dei Trionfi. It is one of the best preserved of Rome’s remains; and its majesty is not visibly injured by the diverse pilferage of its parts. Four finely proportioned shafts, rising from sculptured bases, divide the three arches, and support an ornate entablature. The attic story bears reliefs and statues taken from monuments of Trajan and Aurelius; while the medallions between the columns are from some building of Hadrian’s reign. Two of the reliefs appear to be the work of Constantine’s artists. The crude squat figures, the awkward quarrel of profile faces with frontal legs, the rude piling of heads upon heads as a substitute for perspective, betray a coarsening of technique and taste; but the deep drilling produces, in the play of light and shade, an impressive effect of depth and space; and the episodes are presented with a rough vitality as if Italian art had resolved to return to its source. The colossal figure of Constantine in the Palazzo dei Conservatori carries this primitiveness to a repellent extreme; it seems incredible that the man who presided so graciously over the Council of Nicaea should have resembled this dour barbarian- unless the artist had a mind to illustrate in advance the cynical summary of Gibbon: “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.” Early in this fourth century a new art took form- the “illumination” of manuscripts with miniature paintings. Literature itself was now predominantly Christian. Lucius Firmianus Lactantius expounded Christianity eloquently in Divinae Institutiones (307), and in De Mortibus Persecutorum (314) described the final agonies of the persecuting emperors with Ciceronian elegance and venom. “Religion,” wrote Lactantius, “must by its very nature be untrammeled, unforced, free”- a heresy which he did not live to expiate. More famous was Eusebius Pamphili, bishop of Caesarea. He began his literary career as a priestly scribe and librarian for his episcopal predecessor, Pamphilus, whom he loved so well that he adopted his name. Pamphilus had acquired Origen’s library, and had built around it the largest Christian collection of books yet known. Living among these volumes, Eusebius became the most erudite cleric of his time. Pamphilus lost his life in the Galerian persecution (310), and Eusebius was much plagued by later queries as to how he himself had survived. He made diverse enemies by taking a middle position between Arius and Alexander; nevertheless, he became the Bossuet of Constantine’s court, and was commissioned to write the imperial biography. Part of his scholastic harvest was gathered into a Universal History- the most complete of ancient chronologies. Eusebius arranged sacred and profane history in parallel columns divided by a synchronizing row of dates, and tried to fix the time of every important event from Abraham to Constantine. All later chronologies rested on this “canon.”
\n
\n Putting flesh upon these bones, Eusebius issued in 325 an Ecclesiastical History describing the development of the Church from its beginnings to the Council of Nicaea. Here in the first chapter, again serving as a model for Bossuet, was the earliest philosophy of history- portraying time as the battleground of God and Satan, and all events as advancing the triumph of Christ. The book was poorly arranged but well written. The sources were critically and conscientiously examined, the statements are as accurate as in any ancient work of history; and at every turn Eusebius put posterity in his debt by quoting important documents that would otherwise have been lost. The bishop’s learning is enormous, his style is warmed with feeling and rises to eloquence in moments of theological odium. He frankly excludes such matters as might not edify his Christian readers or support his philosophy, and he manages to write a history of the great Council without mentioning either Arius or Athanasius. The same honest dishonesty makes his Life of Constantine a panegyric rather than a biography. It begins with eight inspiring chapters on the Emperor’s piety and good works, and tells how he “governed his empire in a godly manner for more than thirty years.” One would never guess from this book that Constantine had killed his son, his nephew, and his wife.<\/p>\n
For like Augustus, Constantine had managed well everything but his family. His relations with his mother were generally happy. Apparently by his commission she went to Jerusalem, and leveled to the ground the scandalous Temple of Aphrodite that had been built, it was said, over the Saviour’s tomb. According to Eusebius the Holy Sepulcher thereupon came to light, with the very cross on which Christ had died. Constantine ordered a Church of the Holy Sepulcher to be built over the tomb, and the revered relics were preserved in a special shrine. As in classical days the pagan world had cherished and adored the relics of the Trojan War, and even Rome had boasted the Palladium of Troy’s Athene, so now the Christian world, changing its surface and renewing its essence in the immemorial manner of human life, began to collect and worship relics of Christ and the saints. Helena raised a chapel over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem, modestly served the nuns who ministered there, and then returned to Constantinople to die in the arms of her son. <\/p>\n
Constantine had been twice married: first to Minervina, who had borne him a son Crispus; then to Maximian’s daughter Fausta, by whom he had three daughters and three sons. Crispus became an excellent soldier, and rendered vital aid to his father in the campaigns against Licinius. In 326 Crispus was put to death by Constantine’s order; about the same time the Emperor decreed the execution of Licinianus, son of Licinius by Constantine’s sister Constantia; and shortly thereafter Fausta was slain by her husband’s command. We do not know the reasons for this triple execution. Zosimus assures us that Crispus had made love to Fausta, who accused him to the Emperor; and that Helena, who loved Crispus dearly, had avenged him by persuading Constantine that his wife had yielded to his son. Possibly Fausta had schemed to remove Crispus from the path of her sons’ rise to imperial power, and Licinianus may have been killed for plotting to claim his father’s share of the realm. Fausta achieved her aim after her death, for in 335 Constantine bequeathed the Empire to his surviving sons and nephews. Two years later, at Easter, he celebrated with festival ceremonies the thirtieth year of his reign. Then, feeling the nearness of death, he went to take the warm baths at near-by Aquyrion. As his illness increased, he called for a priest to administer to him that sacrament of baptism which he had purposely deferred to this moment, hoping to be cleansed by it from all the sins of his crowded life. Then the tired ruler, aged sixty-four, laid aside the purple robes of royalty, put on the white garb of a Christian neophyte, and passed away. He was a masterly general, a remarkable administrator, a superlative statesman. He inherited and completed the restorative work of Diocletian; through them the Empire lived 1150 years more. He continued the monarchical forms of Aurelian and Diocletian, partly out of ambition and vanity, partly, no doubt, because he believed that absolute rule was demanded by the chaos of the times. His greatest error lay in dividing the Empire among his sons; presumably he foresaw that they would fight for sole supremacy as he had done, but surmised that they would fight even more certainly if he chose another heir; this, too, is a price of monarchy. His executions we cannot judge, not knowing their provocation; burdened with the problems of rule, he may have allowed fear and jealousy to dethrone his reason for a while; and there are signs that remorse weighed heavily upon his declining years. His Christianity, beginning as policy, appears to have graduated into sincere conviction. He became the most persistent preacher in his realm, persecuted heretics faithfully, and took God into partnership at every step. Wiser than Diocletian, he gave new life to an aging Empire by associating it with a young religion, a vigorous organization, a fresh morality. By his aid Christianity became a state as well as a church, and the mold, for fourteen centuries, of European life and thought. Perhaps, if we except Augustus, the grateful Church was right in naming him the greatest of the emperors.
\n
\nEpilogue <\/p>\n
I. WHY ROME FELL <\/p>\n
“THE two greatest problems in history,” says a brilliant scholar of our time, are “how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall.” We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. Christian writers were keenly appreciative of this decay. Tertullian, about 200, heralded with pleasure the ipsa clausula saeculi – literally the fin de siecle or end of an era- as probably a prelude to the destruction of the pagan world. Cyprian, towards 250, answering the charge that Christians were the source of the Empire’s misfortunes, attributed these to natural causes: <\/p>\n
You must know that the world has grown old, and does not remain in its former vigor. It bears witness to its own decline. The rainfall and the sun’s warmth are both diminishing; the metals are nearly exhausted; the husbandman is failing in the fields. <\/p>\n
Barbarian inroads, and centuries of mining the richer veins, had doubtless lowered Rome’s supply of the precious metals. In central and southern Italy deforestation, erosion, and the neglect of irrigation canals by a diminishing peasantry and a disordered government had left Italy poorer than before. The cause, however, was no inherent exhaustion of the soil, no change in climate, but the negligence and sterility of harassed and discouraged men.<\/p>\n
Biological factors were more fundamental. A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. It has been questioned, but the mass importation of barbarians into the Empire by Aurelius, Valentinian, Aurelian, Probus, and Constantine leaves little room for doubt. Aurelius, to replenish his army, enrolled slaves, gladiators, policemen, criminals; either the crisis was greater, or the free population less, than before; and the slave population had certainly fallen. So many farms had been abandoned, above all in Italy, that Pertinax offered them gratis to anyone who would till them. A law of Septimius Severus speaks of a penuria hominum – a shortage of men. In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time (250) been halved. He mourned to “see the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.” Only the barbarians and the Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.<\/p>\n
What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by the educated classes, it had now seeped down to a proletariat named for its fertility; by A.D. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes, as shown by the use of imperial alimenta to encourage rural parentage; by the third century it had overrun the western provinces, and was lowering man power in Gaul. Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished as poverty grew. Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed into the West. Plantianus, Praetorian Prefect, had one hundred boys emasculated, and then gave them to his daughter as a wedding gift.
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\n Second only to family limitation as a cause of lessened population were the slaughters of pestilence, revolution, and war. Epidemics of major proportions decimated the population under Aurelius, Gallienus, and Constantine. In the plague of 260-65 almost every family in the Empire was attacked; in Rome, we are told, there were 5000 deaths every day for many weeks. The mosquitoes of the Campagna were winning their war against the human invaders of the Pontine marshes, and malaria was sapping the strength of rich and poor in Latium and Tuscany. The holocausts of war and revolution, and perhaps the operation of contraception, abortion, and infanticide, had a dysgenic as well as a numerical effect: the ablest men married latest, bred least, and died soonest. The dole weakened the poor, luxury weakened the rich; and a long peace deprived all classes in the peninsula of the martial qualities and arts. The Germans who were now peopling north Italy and filling the army were physically and morally superior to the surviving native stock; if time had allowed a leisurely assimilation they might have absorbed the classic culture and reinvigorated the Italian blood. But time was not so generous. Moreover, the population of Italy had long since been mingled with Oriental strains physically inferior, though perhaps mentally superior, to the Roman type. The rapidly breeding Germans could not understand the classic culture, did not accept it, did not transmit it; the rapidly breeding Orientals were mostly of a mind to destroy that culture; the Romans, possessing it, sacrificed it to the comforts of sterility. Rome was conquered not by barbarian invasion from without, but by barbarian multiplication within. Moral decay contributed to the dissolution. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance, immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rubbed themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.<\/p>\n
The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome’s fall. For this religion, he and his followers argued, had destroyed the old faith that had given moral character to the Roman soul and stability to the Roman state. It had declared war upon the classic culture- upon science, philosophy, literature, and art. It had brought an enfeebling Oriental mysticism into the realistic stoicism of Roman life; it had turned men’s thoughts from the tasks of this world to an enervating preparation for some cosmic catastrophe, and had lured them into seeking individual salvation through asceticism and prayer, rather than collective salvation through devotion to the state. It had disrupted the unity of the Empire while soldier emperors were struggling to preserve it; it had discouraged its adherents from holding office, or rendering military service; it had preached an ethic of nonresistance and peace when the survival of the Empire had demanded a will to war. Christ’s victory had been Rome’s death. There is some truth in this hard indictment. Christianity unwillingly shared in the chaos of creeds that helped produce that medley of mores which moderately contributed to Rome’s collapse. But the growth of Christianity was more an effect than a cause of Rome’s decay. The breakup of the old religion had begun long before Christ; there were more vigorous attacks upon it in Ennius and Lucretius than in any pagan author after them. Moral disintegration had begun with the Roman conquest of Greece, and had culminated under Nero; thereafter Roman morals improved, and the ethical influence of Christianity upon Roman life was largely a wholesome one. It was because Rome was already dying that Christianity grew so rapidly. Men lost faith in the state not because Christianity held them aloof, but because the state defended wealth against poverty, fought to capture slaves, taxed toil to support luxury, and failed to protect its people from famine, pestilence, invasion, and destitution; forgivably they turned from Caesar preaching war to Christ preaching peace, from incredible brutality to unprecedented charity, from a life without hope or dignity to a faith that consoled their poverty and honored their humanity. Rome was not destroyed by Christianity, any more than by barbarian invasion; it was an empty shell when Christianity rose to influence and invasion came. The economic causes of Rome’s decline have already been stated as prerequisite to the understanding of Diocletian’s reforms; they need only a reminding summary here. The precarious dependence upon provincial grains, the collapse of the slave supply and the latifundia; the deterioration of transport and the perils of trade; the loss of provincial markets to provincial competition; the inability of Italian industry to export the equivalent of Italian imports, and the consequent drain of precious metals to the East; the destructive war between rich and poor; the rising cost of armies, doles, public works, an expanding bureaucracy, and a parasitic court; the depreciation of the currency; the discouragement of ability, and the absorption of investment capital, by confiscatory taxation; the emigration of capital and labor, the strait jacket of serfdom placed upon agriculture, and of caste forced upon industry: all these conspired to sap the material bases of Italian life, until at last the power of Rome was a political ghost surviving its economic death.
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\n The political causes of decay were rooted in one fact- that increasing despotism destroyed the citizen’s civic sense and dried up statesmanship at its source. Powerless to express his political will except by violence, the Roman lost interest in government and became absorbed in his business, his amusements, his legion, or his individual salvation. Patriotism and the pagan religion had been bound together, and now together decayed. The Senate, losing ever more of its power and prestige after Pertinax, relapsed into indolence, subservience, or venality; and the last barrier fell that might have saved the state from militarism and anarchy. Local governments, overrun by imperial correctores and exactores, no longer attracted first-rate men. The responsibility of municipal officials for the tax quotas of their areas, the rising expense of their unpaid honors, the fees, liturgies, benefactions, and games expected of them, the dangers incident to invasion and class war, led to a flight from office corresponding to the flight from taxes, factories, and farms. Men deliberately made themselves ineligible by debasing their social category; some fled to other towns, some became farmers, some monks. In 313 Constantine extended to the Christian clergy that exemption from municipal office, and from several taxes, which pagan priests had traditionally enjoyed; the Church was soon swamped with candidates for ordination, and cities complained of losses in revenue and senators; in the end Constantine was compelled to rule that no man eligible for municipal position should be admitted to the priesthood. The imperial police pursued fugitives from political honors as it hunted evaders of taxes or conscription; it brought them back to the cities and forced them to serve; finally it decreed that a son must inherit the social status of his father, and must accept election if eligible to it by his rank. A serfdom of office rounded out the prison of economic caste.<\/p>\n
Gallienus, fearing a revolt of the Senate, excluded senators from the army. As martial material no longer grew in Italy, this decree completed the military decline of the peninsula. The rise of provincial and mercenary armies, the overthrow of the Praetorian Guard by Septimius Severus, the emergence of provincial generals, and their capture of the imperial throne, destroyed the leadership, even the independence, of Italy long before the fall of the Empire in the West. The armies of Rome were no longer Roman armies; they were composed chiefly of provincials, largely of barbarians; they fought not for their altars and their homes, but for their wages, their donatives, and their loot. They attacked and plundered the cities of the Empire with more relish than they showed in facing the enemy; most of them were the sons of peasants who hated the rich and the cities as exploiters of the poor and the countryside; and as civil strife provided opportunity, they sacked such towns with a thoroughness that left little for alien barbarism to destroy. When military problems became more important than internal affairs, cities near the frontiers were made the seats of government; Rome became a theater for triumphs, a show place of imperial architecture, a museum of political antiquities and forms. The multiplication of capitals and the division of power broke down the unity of administration. The Empire, grown too vast for its statesmen to rule or its armies to defend, began to disintegrate. Left to protect themselves unaided against the Germans and the Scots, Gaul and Britain chose their own imperatores, and made them sovereign; Palmyra seceded under Zenobia, and soon Spain and Africa would yield almost unresisting to barbarian conquest. In the reign of Gallienus thirty generals governed thirty regions of the Empire in practical independence of the central power. In this awful drama of a great state breaking into pieces, the internal causes were the unseen protagonists; the invading barbarians merely entered where weakness had opened the door, and where the failure of biological, moral, economic, and political statesmanship had left the stage to chaos, despondency, and decay.
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\n Externally the fall of the Western Roman Empire was hastened by the expansion and migration of the Hsiung-nu, or Huns, in northwestern Asia. Defeated in their eastward advance by Chinese armies and the Chinese Wall, they turned westward, and about A.D. 355 reached the Volga and the Oxus. Their pressure forced the Sarmatians of Russia to move into the Balkans; the Goths, so harassed, moved again upon the Roman frontiers. They were admitted across the Danube to settle in Moesia (376); maltreated there by Roman officials, they revolted, defeated a large Roman army at Adrianople (378), and for a time threatened Constantinople. In 400 Alaric led the Visigoths over the Alps into Italy, and in 410 they took and sacked Rome. In 429 Gaiseric led the Vandals to the conquest of Spain and Africa, and in 455 they took and sacked Rome. In 451 Attila led the Huns in an attack upon Gaul and Italy; he was defeated at Chalons, but overran Lombardy. In 472 a Pannonian general, Orestes, made his son emperor under the name of Romulus Augustulus. Four years later the barbarian mercenaries who dominated the Roman army deposed this “little Augustus,” and named their leader Odoacer king of Italy. Odoacer recognized the supremacy of the Roman emperor at Constantinople, and was accepted by him as a vassal king. The Roman Empire in the East would go on until 1453; in the West it had come to an end.<\/p>\n
II. THE ROMAN ACHIEVEMENT <\/p>\n
It is easier to explain Rome’s fall than to account for her long survival. This is the essential accomplishment of Rome- that having won the Mediterranean world she adopted its culture, gave it order, prosperity, and peace for 200 years, held back the tide of barbarism for two centuries more, and transmitted the classic heritage to the West before she died.<\/p>\n
Rome has had no rival in the art of government. The Roman state committed a thousand political crimes; it built its edifice upon a selfish oligarchy and an obscurantist priesthood; it achieved a democracy of freemen, and then destroyed it with corruption and violence; it exploited its conquests to support a parasitic Italy, which, when it could no longer exploit, collapsed. Here and there, in East and West, it created a desert and called it peace. But amid all this evil it formed a majestic system of law which through nearly all Europe gave security to life and property, incentive and continuity to industry, from the Decemvirs to Napoleon. It molded a government of separated legislative and executive powers whose checks and balances inspired the makers of constitutions as late as revolutionary America and France. For a time it united monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy so successfully as to win the applause of philosophers, historians, subjects, and enemies. It gave municipal institutions, and for a long period municipal freedom, to half a thousand cities. It administered its Empire at first with greed and cruelty, then with such tolerance and essential justice that the great realm has never again known a like content. It made the desert blossom with civilization, and atoned for its sins with the miracle of a lasting peace. Today our highest labors seek to revive the Pax Romana for a disordered world.<\/p>\n
Within that unsurpassed framework Rome built a culture Greek in origin, Roman in application and result. She was too engrossed in government to create as bountifully in the realms of the mind as Greece had done; but she absorbed with appreciation, and preserved with tenacity, the technical, intellectual, and artistic heritage that she had received from Carthage and Egypt, Greece and the East. She made no advance in science, and no mechanical improvements in industry, but she enriched the world with a commerce moving over secure seas, and a network of enduring roads that became the arteries of a lusty life. Along those roads, and over a thousand handsome bridges, there passed to the medieval and modern worlds the ancient techniques of tillage, handicraft, and art, the science of monumental building, the processes of banking and investment, the organization of medicine and military hospitals, the sanitation of cities, and many varieties of fruit and nut trees, of agricultural or ornamental plants, brought from the East to take new root in the West. Even the secret of central heating came from the warm south to the cold north. The south has created the civilizations, the north has conquered and destroyed or borrowed them.
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\n Rome did not invent education, but she developed it on a scale unknown before, gave it state support, and formed the curriculum that persisted till our harassed youth. She did not invent the arch, the vault, or the dome, but she used them with such audacity and magnificence that in some fields her architecture has remained unequaled; and all the elements of the medieval cathedral were prepared in her basilicas. She did not invent the sculptural portrait, but she gave it a realistic power rarely reached by the idealizing Greeks. She did not invent philosophy, but it was in Lucretius and Seneca that Epicureanism and Stoicism found their most finished form. She did not invent the types of literature, not even the satire; but who could adequately record the influence of Cicero on oratory, the essay, and prose style, of Virgil on Dante, Tasso, Milton,…. of Livy and Tacitus on the writing of history, of Horace and Juvenal on Dryden, Swift, and Pope?<\/p>\n
Her language became, by a most admirable corruption, the speech of Italy, Rumania, France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; half the white man’s world speaks a Latin tongue. Latin was, till the eighteenth century, the Esperanto of science, scholarship, and philosophy in the West; it gave a convenient international terminology to botany and zoology; it survives in the sonorous ritual and official documents of the Roman Church; it still writes medical prescriptions, and haunts the phraseology of the law. It entered by direct appropriation, and again through the Romance languages ( regalis, regal, royal; paganus, pagan, peasant ), to enhance the wealth and flexibility of English speech. Our Roman heritage works in our lives a thousand times a day.<\/p>\n
When Christianity conquered Rome the ecclesiastical structure of the pagan church, the tide and vestments of the pontifex maximus, the worship of the Great Mother and a multitude of comforting divinities, the sense of supersensible presences everywhere, the joy or solemnity of old festivals, and the pageantry of immemorial ceremony, passed like maternal blood into the new religion, and captive Rome captured her conqueror. The reins and skills of government were handed down by a dying empire to a virile papacy; the lost power of the broken sword was rewon by the magic of the consoling word; the armies of the state were replaced by the missionaries of the Church moving in all directions along the Roman roads; and the revolted provinces, accepting Christianity, again acknowledged the sovereignty of Rome. Through the long struggles of the Age of Faith the authority of the ancient capital persisted and grew, until in the Renaissance the classic culture seemed to rise from the grave, and the immortal city became once more the center and summit of the world’s life and wealth and art. When, in 1936, Rome celebrated the 2689th anniversary of her foundation, she could look back upon the most impressive continuity of government and civilization in the history of mankind. May she rise again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
CHAPTER XXX, from the third volume of the Story of Civilization: Caesar and Christ, A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325 Copyright by Will Durant. See the book at Amazon — I. THE WAR OF CHURCH AND STATE: A.D. 64-311 IN pre-Christian days the Roman government had for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7814,7650,7815,7816,7651,7817,7081,7818,7819,7039,7820,7821,7654,6842,7656],"class_list":["post-3520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-adoration","tag-caesar-and-christ","tag-communist-movement","tag-cults","tag-durant","tag-faiths","tag-heretics","tag-immorality","tag-oath-of-allegiance","tag-paganism","tag-polytheism","tag-provocation","tag-roman-civilization","tag-roman-government","tag-will-durant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3520\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}