Rome

Throughout most of antiquity there would have been little reason to pay attention to the town developing on the Tiber River on what we call the Italian peninsula; it was a small, multicultural yet rowdy settlement on the very periphery of the “civilized world.” And yet from Rome would develop the greatest and most consistent military force the ancient world had yet seen. Rome would consolidate cultural, military, political, and social forms and power, cultivating a “Greco-Roman” way of living which would prove the most advanced and refined until the middle of the nineteenth century. As all roads would lead to Rome, so, apparently, did all of what we know as Western ancient history and culture. Western man remains haunted by the Roman Empire and its fall.

According to its own mythology, Rome was founded on 21 April 753 BCE by Romulus, a descendant of a line of kings whose ultimate origin was Troy, yet who had been abandoned as an infant along with his brother Remus and nurtured by a she-wolf and then a herdsman who found them. This would be contemporaneous with Jeroboam II of Israel and Uzziah of Judah, the last moment of “normalcy” in the ancient Near Eastern world before the advance of the Assyrians. Archaeological evidence suggests a long pattern of occupation on many of the seven hills which would make up Rome throughout the Bronze and Early Iron Ages; however, it does seem the settlements were organized into a coherent city-state at some point in the eighth century BCE.

Rome was founded on seven hills along the Tiber River in the area known as Latium; it lay around 30 kilometers inland from the Mediterranean Sea in the middle of the Italian peninsula. The Etruscans had developed a robust and flowering civilization to the immediate north of Rome; not far to its south lay the many Greek colonies which later Romans would call Magna Graecia. The Etruscans and the Greeks would prove profoundly important influences on the development of the Roman city-state.

Romulus, according to the legend, became Rome’s first king, welcoming men of all sorts of origins to come and become citizens, and facilitated the kidnapping of local women to serve as their wives. Six kings, of which the last three were believed to be Etruscan, would follow after Romulus; they would establish the contours of Roman religion and law. The Romans believed the seventh king’s son raped the Roman noblewoman Lucretia, who killed herself after having revealed the matter to some of the Roman nobles. In retaliation Lucius Junius Brutus and other noblemen and citizens of Rome rose up and expelled the king, founding the Roman Republic in 509 BCE, which would give rise to the official name of Rome for the rest of antiquity: Senatus Populusque Romanus (SPQR), the Senate and People of Rome. This would be roughly contemporaneous with the days of Darius the Persian and the completion of the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. While most historians believe the stories to be purely legendary, what evidence we can find does suggest a transition toward a new form of leadership within a fifty-year period of 509 BCE and the throwing off of the yoke of Etruscan authority.

The Roman Republic would endure for almost 500 years and would remain almost continually at war throughout. The Roman Republic maintained the pretense of representing all of the citizens of Rome; in truth, the various noble families dominated the Senate and two of its members would serve as the annual consuls directing the Senate. During the fifth century BCE the Romans would grow ever stronger in their control over Latium and effectively checked and weakened the power of the Etruscans in their southern domains. Rome was sacked by the Gauls, a Celtic people originally from modern-day France, in 387 BCE, destroying any sort of records which were kept of history before that date. The Romans hastily rebuilt and went on the offensive; after a century, the Romans were masters of central Italy.

The greatest power in the western Mediterranean basin during this period was the Carthaginians, the descendants of Phoenician colonists from Tyre who maintained their stronghold of Carthage in north Africa and developed a maritime empire across the coasts of northern Africa, Spain, and France. The Romans would fight the Carthaginians in a series of three “Punic Wars” from 264 to 146 BCE; despite how Hannibal of Carthage would destroy a couple of Roman armies and threaten the integrity of Rome itself, the Romans would defeat the Carthaginians in each of these Punic Wars, and in so doing destroyed Carthage and eliminated its empire as a going concern.

By the end of the third century BCE, Rome was the master of all of Italy and the southern coast of Spain; by 146 BCE the Romans had become masters of almost all of the Iberian Peninsula, the coast of the Adriatic Sea, Greece, and parts of western Asia Minor. Yet all was not well among the Senate and People of Rome: class-based conflicts continually came to the fore, and many among the elite perceived a great way forward in obtaining power and influence by advancing a populist cause. This would lead to a series of civil wars, power given over to dictators, and two sets of triumvirates governing the city-state and its armies. The generals, dictators, and triumvirs have become historically famous and infamous: Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, and Octavian.

Despite the internal discord of the period from 150-27 BCE, Roman armies continued their advance, and the lands of Britain, Gaul (modern-day France), Numidia, much of the Anatolian peninsula, Libya, Egypt, and Syria came under Roman hegemony. The Roman general Pompey intervened in the civil war between the Hasmoneans Hyrcanus and Aristobulus in 63 BCE; he besieged and conquered Jerusalem, and infamously barged into the Most Holy Place of the Second Temple (cf. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 14). The Romans would rule over Judea by means of proxy kings or governors from 63 BCE until the First Jewish War of 66-70 CE, by a legate of the Roman army until the Second Jewish War of 132-135 CE, was then merged with and made part of Syria Palaestina until 300, and finally divided into three “Palaestinae” provinces by Diocletian around 300.

Octavian, Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew, would be the last man standing after all of the civil conflicts; he would declare himself as princeps, or the first among the Senate and People of Rome, in an attempt to make his imperial designs more palatable. Whereas representatives of the Roman Republic had assassinated his great-uncle Julius Caesar for considering becoming dictator for life, the civil wars had exhausted the Senate and People of Rome, and Octavian would become known as Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, and the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire in 27 BCE. Augustus would consolidate the Empire into its most recognizable form, encompassing the whole of the Mediterranean Sea, the Iberian and most of the Anatolian peninsulas, Britain, Gaul to the River Rhine, the Balkan Peninsula, the Levant, Egypt, and the north African seacoast. Later emperors would, at times, add territory in Germany, the lands north of the Balkan Peninsula to the River Danube, and parts of Mesopotamia.

Thus began what the Romans would call the Pax Romana, an overall unprecedented time of peace, stability, and security throughout the Mediterranean world, which would last until the third century CE. The Romans had cultivated skill in engineering, governance, legislation, and the military; the Roman elite had become quite fond of Greek culture and philosophy. The western half of the Roman Empire had never before been organized into a single political entity, and would rarely again see such kind of uniformity; Latin, the language of the Romans, would become pervasive throughout the west. The eastern half of the Roman Empire continued with the Hellenization process as had been playing out ever since Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, and generally spoke Greek; Roman influence was seen primarily in terms of engineering and governance. The pax Romana coincided with what scientists have called the Roman Warm Period, a climactic period from roughly 200 BCE to 200 CE which allowed for greater harvests in the Mediterranean, and thus to feed a larger populace.

The world of the pax Romana is the world of Jesus, the Apostles, and the development of early Christianity. Overall life in the Roman Empire in these days was the “best” it had ever been under any ancient civilization, and modern Western civilizations would not again reach similar levels of quality of life and life expectancy until the early modern period of 1600-1820. Even though the Roman authorities proved at best ambivalent, and at worst outright hostile toward Christians and Christianity, the world they conquered and administered facilitated the spread of the Christian faith. Paul and other early Christians traveled far and wide on Roman roads and could speak to people from Spain to Iraq and from Britain to Egypt in Greek or Latin and be understood. Paul would leverage his privileges and rights as a Roman citizen to avoid certain forms of punishment and make appeal to Caesar, the Emperor himself (cf. Acts 22:23-29, 25:10-12).

On the whole, however, things were not well between the Romans and the peoples of the One True God. The Romans were polytheistic and were more than happy to have its subjects also serve Roma and the genius of the emperor, both past and present, as gods. The Jewish people were given an exemption because of the antiquity of their customs; nevertheless, they continually bristled against what they viewed as Roman imperial oppression, and they rose in revolt against the Romans twice, in the First Jewish War of 66-70 and the Second Jewish War of 132-136. As a result of these wars, along with other conflicts in the provinces, Jerusalem and the Second Temple were destroyed, the Jewish population of Alexandria was decimated, and Jewish people were banned from Jerusalem, which was re-christened Aelia Capitolina and a temple to Zeus built on the Temple Mount. Christians found themselves with even fewer privileges than the Jewish people: while Christians appealed to their heritage in Moses and the prophets, the Romans reckoned Christianity as a novel superstition, since the Christians claimed Jesus was God in the flesh and was crucified and raised from the dead in the days of Tiberius Caesar. From the days of Nero until the days of Diocletian, Christians would endure periodic periods of active persecution, in which the Roman authorities would seek out Christians to destroy their Scriptures and have executed any of them who would not offer sacrifice to the genius of the emperor. Yet even if the Romans were not engaged in an active time of persecution, Christians could at any point be accused before a Roman official and be imprisoned and/or executed, and many Christians would be marginalized from participation in economic and social life throughout the Empire because of their faith.

In the days of Domitian John was given a vision of that which was to come in the book of Revelation. The end of the pax Romana at the end of the second and throughout the third centuries CE provided grotesque fulfillment of what had been seen. The Roman Empire was beset by the Antonine (165-180) and the Cyprianic (249-262) plagues, which are believed to have been smallpox/measles and Ebola or some other hemorrhagic fever, and led to the deaths of significant percentages of the Roman populace. These came at the same time as climactic changes which led to degraded soils and smaller harvests, leading to widespread hunger and famine. Such climactic changes brought the first of the “barbarian invasions”. The Persian Sassanids overtook the Parthians as rulers over Iran and Mesopotamia and inflicted many severe defeats on the Roman army. Politically the period was a mess more often than not, with emperors rising and falling frequently.

It is a testament to what the Romans built that their Empire somehow managed to survive the third century. Diocletian and then Constantine would provide a level of stability to the position of Emperor, and Constantine is famous for having established the Edict of Milan promoting tolerance of the Christian faith, and converting to Christianity himself. Constantine was also justly famous for establishing a new great city in the east, at the Bosphorus channel between the Sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, at the point where Europe and Asia meet; the city would become known as Constantinople (modern Istanbul in Turkey).

By the end of the fourth century CE the emperor Theodosius would have Christianity established as the religion of the Roman Empire. For the first time in human history since time immemorial, the One True God was being honored, at least in pretense, more than the pagan gods of the nations; a situation unimaginable in the days of Jesus and the Apostles. But the days of the Roman Empire as it had been were numbered. Theodosius would be the last emperor over the unified Roman Empire of west and east. Within a generation, the western half of the Roman Empire would entirely collapse. Alaric the Visigoth oversaw the sacking of Rome in 410; the western Roman Empire would become divided between the Germanic people known as the Franks, the Goths, the Visigoths, and the Vandals. The last Roman Emperor in Rome, Romulus Augustulus, was set aside by Odoacer in 476.

The eastern Roman Empire, however, would persevere for another millennium. Emperors styling themselves as Roman Emperors ruling over the Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople until 1453 CE. In the sixth century Justinian would re-assert “Roman” rule over Italy and parts of north Africa; he would also oversee major changes to Roman laws and the establishment of the Code of Justinian as well as the building of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It was also during Justinian’s reign that the bubonic plague spread throughout the Eastern Roman Empire and likely further west, likely killing a third to half of the population, and would return in waves for generations from 541 to around 750.

The bubonic plague, “barbarian” invasions and wars, and various famines and other challenges in the days of Justinian brought an end to the ancient world and inaugurated the medieval one. Almost all of the glory, and even much of the knowledge, of the ancient world would be lost. In the west, the Roman Catholic Church would preserve Roman governance and legal customs and the Latin language; the vast majority of the primary sources we have from the ancient world were preserved by monks in medieval European monasteries. From Latin would develop French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, and would profoundly shape English through French; many would write treatises in Latin for generations, and knowledge of Latin was expected as part of a classical education until only the past couple of generations.

Indeed, to this very day many remain haunted by the Roman Empire, its glories and its fall. The medieval world of Europe lived in the shadow of the ruins of the Roman Empire and were very cognizant of the comparative decline. Anyone who has ever attempted to exert hegemony over major parts of Europe has done so with the Roman Empire and its Caesars in mind: Charlemagne and the creation of the Holy Roman Empire, which was in truth none of those things, in 800; the kaiser, German for “Caesar,” and the czar/tsar, Russian for “Caesar,” over Germany and Russia; Napoleon; Hitler and Mussolini. To this day the remains of Roman aqueducts, roads, and towns can be found throughout the lands of their former empire. The Romans fascinate us to this day: for instance, only recently have we ascertained some of the ingredients of Roman concrete, and have come to realize their formulation weathers and endures in ways superior to our own.

While Rome may fascinate us, and its fall haunt us, we do well to remember how Rome was “whore Babylon” to early Christians: the ultimate culmination of the great pagan oppressive power, projecting its strength through political and economic means, persecuting the people of God. Thus the Roman Empire was judged and condemned; while the empire was “Christianized” in late antiquity, the Christian religious institutions which it engendered have often been understood in terms of “whore Babylon” as well ever since. Roman armies made deserts and called them “paradise”; the pax Romana came at the end of Roman spears. We do better to come as Christians and bring the grace, mercy, and peace of the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, who brought forth that Kingdom through His own death and resurrection. May we honor the Lord Jesus Christ and serve Him in all things!

Ethan R. Longhenry