Christian Rome Discussion

Constantine had a lot of guts—and I am not referring to his waistline! If he knew anything about history—particularly Egyptian history—he must have had a lot of second thoughts about what he was doing.

Consider Akhenaten. He and his wife decided they would turn Egypt from polytheism to monotheism. They decided to throw out the worship of all the other gods, and instead, they wanted everyone to worship the Aten, the Sun God. Furthermore, Akhenaten decided to move the seat of his government out of old, pagan Thebes and create a completely new city, which he called Amarna. There, he and his wife tried to set Egypt on a new theological course, disenfranchising all the old priests of the old faiths and setting themselves up as the leaders of the new religion.

The only problem was, their attempt failed--miserably.

The evolution of Christianity from an outlaw sect to the official, exclusive religion of the Roman Empire is surely one of history's strangest stories. Considering how strongly Christians were persecuted and villified in the years following the death of Jesus, we surely could not have expected that particular religion to have gained such widespread acceptance. The mere fact that the Romans went from being profoundly polytheistic to profoundly monotheistic in a period of about 300 years is surprising enough in itself.

So, here's my question for this week: Constantine's religious revolution succeeded. Why did he succeed where Akhenaten failed?

Set aside, for a moment, your own personal religious convictions. Don't argue that Christianity succeeded because it is the one and only true faith—I think you'd get an argument from the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, the Daoists, the Hindi, and a lot of other people, too. Instead, focus on history. Why was Akhenaten's experiment with monotheism almost doomed to failure from the start and Constantine's was more successful?

Remember that your post must contain at least 200 words to earn all the points. You must also use at least five of the red vocabulary terms from this week's study unit. And remember, too, that your focus here should be on why Constantine succeeded, not why Akhenaten failed, although you will want to use what you remember of Akhenaten's experience as a contrast..

These are the vocabulary for this Unit:

1. Abraham2. Sarah3. Isaac4. Hagar5. Ishmael6. Second Temple7. eschatology

8. Torah9. pentateuch10. Kingdom Movement11. Stephen12. Saul13. Zealots14. Josephus15. Masada16. Ignatius17. synoptic gospels18. Tertullian19. Origen20. Constantine21. Trajan’s Column22. Hadrian’s Wall23. Baths of Caracalla24. Zenobia25. Arch of Constantine26. Old St. Peter’s27. Church of the Holy Sepulchre28. Byzantium29. Vespasian30. Diocletian31. Milvian Bridge32. basilica33. apse34. nave35. aisle36. clerestory37. narthex

This is the reading material for the assignment:

IntroductionThis unit begins by surveying the origins of Christianity within the Roman Empire between the reign of Augustus through the reign of Constantine. Among other topics, we look at the history of the

Jews, the contributions of Paul, the persecution of the Christians, and the development of early Christian art and architecture.

The Narration: Part One

Humanities 250: Ideas and Values in the Humanities. Hi, this is Richard Felnagle speaking, and this program is the overview for the unit on Christian Rome.

In the eighteenth century, a British historian and Parliamentarian named Edward Gibbon published what is arguably the best known history book ever written. Certainly, it has the best known title. The book is called The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

This book is still much admired today for its scholarship and for its eminent readability—and it is available from any number of sites on the Web for free if you’d like to look at yourself—but in this book, Gibbon offered up two ideas that are not so admired these days. First, he argued that the Roman Empire fell in the year 476 AD. He also suggested that while there were many causes for that fall, one of the big ones was the pernicious influence of Christianity. According to Gibbon, Christianity pretty much sucked the life out of the empire. I quote now from the book . . .

[ . . . ] the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of the military spirit were buried in the cloister; a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

And he goes on from there—believe me! Now, history is just somebody’s opinion, and Gibbon was certainly entitled to his opinion, but most historians today disagree, me included. First, we need to get over this idea that Rome fell in 476.

In point of fact, the Roman Empire stayed in business uninterrupted, continuously until the year 1453. In that year, the Empire formally closed its shop, or, more to the point, had it closed for them by the Muslim general Mehmet, known as Mehmet the Conqueror. He used some of the biggest cannon ever seen on the planet up to that time to blow holes in the mighty walls protecting Constantinople, the last outpost and final resting place of the Roman Empire. When those walls fell, the Roman Empire fell with it, but that’s a story for another day.

What happened in 476 is that for the first time, administrative control of the city of Rome passed out of the hands of the Roman Empire and into the hands of a German officer with the almost unpronounceable name Odoacer. Or maybe it’s pronounced Odovacar. I’ve seen it both ways.

However you pronounce it, he was a German mercenary who had been trained by the Romans, and he was no barbarian. He spoke Latin, and he was fully as civilized as any Roman at the time. He captured Rome and had the official paraphernalia of office returned to the Romans at Constantinople. The Emperor at the time put up no fuss at all. He appointed Odoacer a patrician and acknowledged his authority, so it was business as usual.

See, it didn’t really mean anything because by that time, the city of Rome was no longer the capital of the Empire. About two hundred years before, the head office of the empire had been moved to the east, to Constantinople.

That happened because a general named Constantine had become Rome’s first Christian emperor, and he had decided that he needed a new capital city. Part of the reason was strategic—the western part of the empire was becoming increasingly harder to defend. Rome was, to be honest, no longer secure. But also, Rome was an old pagan city, and as Rome’s first Christian emperor, Constantine probably realized that it was going to be hard to make Rome Christian with all that pagan chutchkey on every street corner, not to mention the old Colosseum, a constant reminder of the brutal repression of the Christians that had gone on for more than two hundred years.

So, Constantine looked east, where he found an old Greek city called Byzantium. Largely abandoned, it was nevertheless a piece of prime real estate on the shore of the Bosporus, neatly situation between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and he decided to build his new Christian city there.

Thus, Constantinople became the first planned Christian city in the world. Today, Constantinople is called Istanbul. And you can’t go back to Constantinople because . . . well, you get the picture.

So what had caused Constantine to become a Christian emperor? Well, the years following the reign of Augustus had not been good ones for Rome.

Rival generals were constantly fighting each other to see who could take control of the empire, and that’s what Constantine was doing one day in the year 312—preparing to attack Rome so he could take control of the empire—when he saw a miraculous apparition in the sky, a flaming sword on which were written the words, “By this conquer.” That next day, he did, so he decided that his victory must have been God’s will, so he decided to become a Christian.

If I’m not mistaken, his wife and mother had already converted, so it wasn’t that much of a leap for him. Christianity had been a very divisive force in the empire, but Constantine may just have just decided: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em! In other words, he saw Christianity as a possible force that could be used to unite the empire under his leadership.

Apparently, he didn’t know or care that Akhenaton and Nefertiti had tried the same gig in Egypt—starting a new monotheistic religion and making themselves the head priests—but their attempt had not gone well.

Now, how did it happen that Constantine’s wife and mother had already signed on?

Well, for that, I think we have to credit Christianity’s first two great pitchmen, one who consciously did everything he could to promote Christianity and one did everything he could to stamp it out. But in either case, the results in both cases were the same. But to understand those two guys, we have to step backward a couple of millennia and talk about the origins of the Jews.

The Jews, of course, are a very old people, dating back to the Babylonian days. Somewhere around the year 2000 BC, a prophet named Abraham was given a personal invitation by God to lead his people out of Babylon and start a new faith. If Abraham and his people played ball, then God would reward them. Playing ball meant worshipping only one God: i.e., God, and obeying some obscure dietary laws and a few other things. Abraham was agreeable. Among his other problems, he and his wife, Sarah, were childless, and God promised them he would see to it that they had children. Sarah, who was getting on in years, didn’t relish the idea of becoming a mother, so she gave Abraham her handmaiden, a woman named Hagar, and soon Hagar presented Abraham with the promised son: Ishmael. Later, though, Sarah did become pregnant, and she presented Abraham with a son named Isaac.

Eventually, God decided to try to test Abraham’s faith, and he ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham reluctantly but dutifully obeyed, but at the last moment, an angel intervened, and Isaac’s life was spared.

The Jews, by the way, regard Isaac as the head of their line, and the Muslims regard Ishmael as their distant ancestor. So both Judaism and Islam are linked by having the same great, great, great, great, great grandfather, Abraham.

For a while, Abraham’s descendants and followers lived in Palestine and prospered, but somewhere around 1500, a large number of these people wandered into Egypt, which was then having problems with the people we know as the Hyksos. The Egyptians eventually overcame the Hyksos and made slaves out of them, and while they were at it, they made slaves out of the Jews, too. But around 1240 BC, another prophet, Moses, played by Charlton Heston, led them out of Egypt and into the Sinai peninsula, where he received the Ten Commandments.

The first two of these are particularly significant. The first is the command to worship no other gods, and the second one is not to make any images of God and/or to worship any such images. These are both commandments that define how this religion was going to be different from all the others because they were polytheistic. However, the Jews were not done being a captive people.

Eventually, the Jews found their way back to Palestine, and around 1000 BC, they established a kingdom, but around 900 BC, that kingdom split in two. The northern kingdom was called Israel, and its capital was at Samaria. The southern kingdom was called Judah, and its capital was at Jerusalem. But collectively, they were all known as Judeans, or Jews.

In 722 BC, the northern kingdom was captured by the Assyrians, and in 586 BC, the Babylonians captured the Kingdom of Judah and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem.

The Babylonian captivity lasted forty years, and then the Jews were allowed to return to Judea, and at that time they built the second temple in Jerusalem. In 332, Judea was captured by Alexander the Great and added to his kingdom, and in 63 BC, the Romans conquered Judea and added it to their empire.

The Jews were not happy at being acquired in this way, and they resisted the Romans as firmly as they had resisted the Greeks, but the Romans were bigger and meaner. In the year 66 AD, the resistance erupted into a full-blown rebellion, which the Romans eventually put down, but not before they burned the temple in Jerusalem, a point to which we shall return later in this overview.

In the meantime, a new movement had begun among the Jews, a movement called the Kingdom Movement.

These people believed that the end of the world was coming and God was going to send another prophet to establish His kingdom on earth. During this time, several young prophets appeared and preached and attracted followers. One of these “Kingdom” prophets was the man we know as Jesus.

Now, as was the custom throughout the Roman empire, the Jews controlled their own local affairs, and the Romans were primarily a military presence. But all this “Kingdom” talk made the Jewish leaders in authority uneasy because their power was being compromised, and the “Kingdom” movement made the Romans equally uneasy because it sounded as though a revolution were being planned against them.

Eventually, Jesus and his followers began attracting too much attention, and Jesus was put to death by the particularly unpleasant means of crucifixion—which is actually a lingering death by asphyxiation. However, martyring the leader of a radical movement is never a good idea, and instead of crushing the “Jesus” movement, the murder of Jesus only publicized the movement and strengthened the resolve of its followers.

And then, rumors began to spread that Jesus had been more than mortal and that he had come back from the dead to address his followers. Certain other miraculous events were reported, such as the events on Pentecost, when Jesus’ followers were all suddenly possessed and began speaking in tongues.

As the Jesus movement continued to grow and gain strength, the Romans continued to try to suppress it. Enter our first pitchman, a character named Saul. That’s not the name you know him by, but we’ll get to his other name presently.

End of Part One

The Narration: Part Two

Saul was a Jew, but he had been brought up in the Roman world. Being Roman, at that time, was really not such a bad thing. Rome was still the biggest and best thing around, and Saul was like

many Jews who were willing to make certain compromises to co-exist with the Romans. Eventually, Saul took a job helping to persecute the Christians, as they were beginning to be known. He probably hoped to curry favor with the Romans and with the Jewish establishment in the process. And he was very good at his job, but one day, he was stopped dead in his tracks with a blinding light and an unearthly voice that said to him, “Saul! Why do you persecute me!” Convinced that Jesus had spoken to him, Saul quickly changed directions and decided that instead of persecuting the Christians, he would become one of them and seek to promote the faith. For that purpose, he changed his name to Paul, and he quickly became one of Christianity’s most eager supporters.

Now, the Augustan age was over, and the emperors who followed him were, for the most part, losers and loonies. Rome was kind of going down the tubes., rather like the way the Periclean Age ended suddenly with the Athenians’ disastrous decision to go to war with the Spartans. Many people thought the end of the world was coming any day. And Paul came to an important conclusion.

Given that Jesus might indeed be coming back any moment to start the Kingdom of God on earth, it was important that as many people as possible be “saved” right away. He recognized that the Romans would have trouble accepting the new religion if they had to become Jews first. So, he began to advocate the idea that you didn’t have to be a Jew in order to be a Christian.

Specifically, you didn’t have to be circumcised—something that a lot of Roman men didn’t want—and you didn’t have to follow the Jewish dietary laws, which meant that you could have all the pork and shellfish that you liked. Some of the original disciples disagreed—after all, Paul was not one of their number. He as a Johnny Come Lately—who was he to be making decisions like these?

Meanwhile, Paul went on tour and did a lot of talk shows and making personal appearances at early Christian churches in Greece and points west. Along the way, he wrote a series of letters, or epistles, to the young churches he found, and these letters became the first statement of Christian theology.

It is from Paul, by the way, that the Catholic Church seems to inherit its ideas that sex is a bad thing. According to Paul, everyone should give up earthly pleasure and prepare for the coming of the Kingdom—and that meant giving up sex. However, he recognized that the wait might be longer than originally expected and, according to him, it was better to marry than to burn.

Anyway, it is at this point that our second pitchman enters the picture, the one who really didn’t want to promote Christianity at all. The Emperor Nero.

During Nero’s reign in the year 64 AD, a terrible fire broke out in Rome.

[Video excerpt from PBS’ “Secrets of the Dead: The Great Fire of Rome.”]

The disastrous blaze incinerated a large part of the city and burned for several days. After the flames were finally extinguished, a nasty rumor started to make its way around town. Nero was

not by any means popular, and some Romans dared to suggest that Nero might himself have started the fire because he was interested in a new palace for himself, and, indeed, Nero had lost no time in announcing that he was taking over a choice piece of real estate that had just been cleared by the inferno, for his new digs.

Historians are divided on this point, but there are some who subscribe to the idea the Nero may indeed have been responsible for the big fire.

Whatever the truth in that direction, Nero realized that the rumors were very dangerous to him, and he needed to counteract them. He needed a scapegoat, so he announced that the fire had actually been lit by those nasty, anti-social Christians. A popular choice! Most Romans were suspicious of the new sect. After all, the leader of this group had been crucified with other common criminals in Jerusalem. And there were other allegations against them, so the accusation having been made, it won easy acceptance.

Nero then had a representative number of Christians rounded up and murdered horribly in the arena, and this act marked the beginning of organized persecution of the Christians in Rome, a persecution that would continue until the time of Constantine.

But Nero’s plan backfired. Again, many people in Rome, too, were worried that the end of the world was coming, and the great fire had done nothing to improve their sense of security. Many people at this time were turning to cult religions, particularly any that promised a better life in the next world. When the Christians were martyred in the arena, they inevitably went to their deaths with calm and a resolution that was remarkable to behold. Several contemporary accounts relate how the crowds were amazed at the stoic demeanor of the victims as they faced torture in the arena.

And the people in the crowd began to be curious what about this new Christian religion gave these people such calm in the face of death, such certainty of their finding a better world in the next life. As a result, the public martyrdoms of the Christians only served as kind of promotion for the new religion.

And the new religion found a particularly ready acceptance among women, who were generally frozen out of a lot of power in Rome. Christianity made no such distinctions. And the religion, oddly enough, appealed to some Roman men too, who found an easy transition from Mithraism, a cult religion with a number of interesting correspondences to Christianity.

In any event, by the time of Constantine, the uncertainty of the empire, the persecution of the Christians, and the doctrines of Paul, had become well known, and therefore, Constantine’s conversion seems almost an inevitability.

So much for Gibbons’ theory that Christianity brought down the Roman Empire. If anything, Christianity was more the cement that held it together.

Anyway, that concludes the overview for this unit, but there are a couple of odd details that I don’t want to overlook.

In 74 AD, Jewish resistance to the Romans had its fiercest moment at a place called Masada. 960 Jewish rebels occupied a mountain fortress, where they managed to hold off 5000 Roman troops for a year. The story is a remarkable one and is covered in this unit.

Equally remarkable is Masada itself, which is today a major destination for visitors to Israel.

Second, there is the matter of the Temple in Jerusalem. The temple was completely destroyed by the Romans in the year 66 AD. Today, what remains in Jerusalem is only a retaining wall that was built to level the ground that the temple was built on. This wall is sacred to the Jews. Known as the “Wailing Wall,” it is a major center for prayer. It is so important that there are webcams focused on the wall day and night, so you can see the wall anytime you want over the Internet.

Third, Constantine must have been a frustrated civil engineer because he loved to build things. In addition to building a city for himself in what is now Turkey, he also built a number of basilicas.

These were long, rectangular meeting halls, but you know how the Romans loved their arches. These buildings usually bulged out at one end in a curve, topped with a half dome. This part of the building was called an apse, and these halls became the characteristic shape for building houses of worship for the new Christians.

Constantine built several of these including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, built on the site believed to be the location of the tomb where Jesus’ body was taken and from which he later rose from the dead.

Also, Constantine built the first basilica on the site in Rome where Peter was supposed to have been buried after he was crucified. This building became known as Old St. Peter’s. After more than 1200 hundred years of use, that building was falling apart, and in the early 1500s, construction was begun on the building which now occupies that site, or New St. Peter’s.

So, one way or another, Constantine literally built Rome into a Christian empire. And that empire lasted all the way to 1453. But this overview isn’t going to last any longer. Time for you to start studying. I’ll see you next time.

Section One: Judaism

While Rome was completing its transformation from a republic to an empire (or maybe we should say, when Rome was devolving from a republic to an empire), a number of developments at the eastern end of the Mediterranean were about to begin to transform Rome in other ways. To understand how Rome became the first Christian empire, we first have to understand something about the origins of Christianity, and to understand the Christians, we need to know something of the history of the Jews. To do so, we will need to spend some time in and around the area known as Palestine, so we need to start with a little map study to familiarize ourselves with the area as it is today.

One of the most important defining features of Israel today is the Jordan River, which begins in the north, in the area known as the Golan Heights (at the top of the map on the right). This area

was not originally part of the modern state of Israel as it was created in 1948. Israel captured this area from Syria in the infamous Six-Day War of 1967.

From its origins on Mount Hermon, the Jordan then descends to form the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake (a very pretty place, too), and from there it descends even farther, eventually reaching the Dead Sea (a very unusual place—see below), which lies farther below sea level than any other body of water in the world.

By the way: during the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel also took away the so-called West Bank area from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt (on the Mediterranean coast, where Israel and Egypt share a border). In 1993, the Palestinians and the Israelis signed the first of several peace agreements designed to provide for Palestinian administration of these areas beginning in 1994. (And we cover all that in HUM251, too.)

Here's an idea for a day at the beach like no other. Think about visiting the "Living" Dead Sea—the lowest spot on land! 1388 feet below sea level and 33.7% salt. It's a happening place, where you can REALLY play in the mud.

Abraham

Who?

Scholar and best selling author Bruce Feiler is the author of Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths. Early in this book, Feiler explains:

The great patriarch of the Hebrew Bible is also the spiritual forefather of the New Testament and the grand holy architect of the Koran. Abraham is the shared ancestor of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He is the linchpin of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is the centerpiece of the battle between the West and Islamic extremists. He is the father—in many cases, the purported biological father—of 12 million Jews, 2 billion Christians, and 1 billion Muslims around the world. He is history’s first monotheist. And he is largely unknown (p. 9, published by William Morrow, 2002).

In other words, Abraham is the father of three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity traces its origins back to Judaism, and Judaism and Islam trace their origins back to Abraham.

That Abraham!.

According to events described in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Abraham was the leader of the Hebrews. He was born in the city of Ur (which we covered in the Early Civilizations unit). Just exactly when he was born is a matter of scholarly debate, but some argue he was born in 2018 BC, so we'll go with that. Another tradition says that he can trace his lineage directly back to Noah. The Bible has little to say about his upbringing, but the Koran—in which he is called Ibrahim—has a lot to say on this subject (and we'll cover that topic in the Rise of Islam unit).

To refresh your memory, the city of Ur is in the lower right part of the map below, in the area identified as Sumer. Notice also where the modern state of Israel would be and where the Arabian Desert is located.

Mesopotamia, as you recall, was the home to three ancient civilizations, the Sumerians, the Akkadians, and the Babylonians. The Akkadian dynasties lasted from around 2350 BC to about 2000 BC, when the Babylonians, coming from the northern part of Mesopotamia, swept through and took control of the Akkadian kingdoms. Therefore, Abraham may have been around to witness the Babylonian takeover.

Also, as you recall, the Mesopotamians were all polytheistic. Abraham—or Abram, as he was known originally—grew up in this polytheistic culture, but eventually, he decided there was only one god. According to the 12th century Jewish philosopher and scholar Maimonides:

No sooner was [Abraham] weaned—and he was but a small child—that his mind began to seek and wonder: How do the heavenly bodies orbit without a moving force? Who moves them? They cannot move themselves! Immersed amongst the foolish idol-worshippers of Ur Casdim, he had no one to teach him anything; his father, mother and countrymen, and he amongst them, all worshipped idols. But his heart sought, and came to know that there is one G-d [ . . . ] who created all and that in all existence there is none other than Him. He came to know that the entire world erred. [From a translation in an article called "The History of Monotheism," at chabad.org.]

According to Bruce Feiler, how much of the life of Abraham is myth and how much is fact is hard to know. For one thing, the name “Abram” in Hebrew means “the father is exalted” or “mighty father” so the name may actually be a title more than a name. (Note: For most of the rest of this section on Abraham, I am heavily indebted to Feiler.)

Now, it's one thing to be polytheistic and worship your favorite god, and it's entirely another thing to say your god is the only true god and everybody else's god is a false god. That kind of talk can get you kicked out of the community! (The Christians would have exactly that problem with the Romans later.) When Abraham was seventy-five, the Bible says that God spoke directly to Abraham and made him an offer he couldn't refuse: If Abraham would agree to lead his people to a land that God would subsequently reveal, God would make Abraham the father of a great nation. The event is depicted in the Renaisance painting on the right—and notice the expression on the face of Sarah, Abraham's wife!

At that time, Abraham and Sarah were childless, so this deal had great personal significance for Abraham. Eventually, God identified the real estate that Abraham and his descendents were to possess: all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. (Look at the map above again to see what a hunk of real estate that was. Location, location, location!)

But how could Abraham become the father of a great nation if he had no children? Interesting question.

Just to clarify the timeline described in the previous video clip, I want to explain that thirteen years after the birth of Ishmael, God invented circumcision (ouch!), and ordered Abraham to circumcise himself and Ishmael and then every other male in his household. In return for this fulfilling this command, God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, and then—wonder of wonders!—Abraham was rewarded again when Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to a son, named Isaac (which means “he laughs”). After that event, Hagar and Ishmael were kicked out.

But God wasn't done with Abraham yet. One day (Genesis 22), God ordered Abraham to kill Isaac and turn him into a burnt offering. Exactly how old Isaac was supposed to be at this time is another matter of scholarly dispute—he may have been a boy or he may have been a man. One way or another, God devised this scheme as a test of Abraham’s faith, and Abraham dutifully started the wheels turning, but just at the last moment, God intervened and stopped Abraham from murdering his son. God said Abraham had passed the test. The story of Abraham and Isaac later became a celebrated motif in art, and Rembrandt's painting, shown on the left, is an example.

Eventually, Abraham led his people into Palestine. Some settled in the northern part, and some remained nomadic in the southern part, and this separation divided the Hebrew people for hundreds of years.

Although the Hebrews had split from the Mesopotamians, the Hebrews had still retained several important cultural elements from the Mesopotamians, including their emphasis on law, the most important example of which was the code of Hammurabi, which had supposedly been given to man from Shamash, the Babylonian and Sumerian god of justice. As would be case with Moses later on, the law was not a human invention, but something received from a deity.

The Ten Commandments

Around 1500, several of the nomadic Hebrews in the south migrated further south into Egypt, which was then overrun by a people called the Hyksos, but the Egyptians regained control and enslaved both the Hyksos and the Hebrews. Around 1250 BC, Moses led the Hebrews out of slavery and out of Egypt and into the Sinai Peninsula and the foot of Mt. Sinai, where he received ten commandments.

Just to be sure that all of God's chosen people are on the same page . . . er, tablet, the first four commandments lay down the foundation of the new order. First—unlike the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians and just about everybody else at the time—there is one only god. No more polytheism. Second, there are to be no idols (i.e., no likenesses of God) to worship. This commandment was a specific jab at all the images of gods and goddesses worshipped by the Mesopotamians and the Egyptians and everybody else at the time. The third and fourth commandments are logical extensions of the first two: You must not take the name of the lord in vain, and you must keep the sabbath holy.

The other six commandments, however, define a kind of civil code, not unlike the Code of Hammurabi, which deals with very practical matters. Because the ten commandments define both the relationship between the one god and the people and also describe how those people are to behave, the result is what scholars call ethical monotheism. If you recall, the Greek gods were

hardly role models for good behavior. The gods of the Egyptians were primarily in charge of managing natural forces. All these gods could mess with you if you forgot to make the required sacrifices, but none of these gods really policed anyone's behavior. The God of Abraham, on the other hand, had very definite ideas on that subject.

Even so, the six commandments that address righteous living do not spell out any punishments for those people who won't play ball. You will recall that the code that Hammurabi had very detailed instructions on how to punish transgressors. So, why not the ten commandments? Because spelling out punishments wasn't necesary. The implication is that transgressors would be handled by ostracism—in other words, you mess up and you don't get to be one of the chosen people anymore.

Clearly, the Hebrew god was not exactly warm and fuzzy. This god was a somewhat vindictive god, one who had already destroyed the entire world at least once (the flood) and completely obliterated the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, as well.

The First Temple

According to the Bible, God wasn't happy with the way his chosen people responded to the commandments, and they were forced to wander around some more as a punishment, but by 1100 BC, the Israelites had managed to find their way back to Canaan, and by about 1000 BC, they established a monarchy under King Saul (1010-790 BC). David succeeded Saul, and he unified the people and established Jerusalem as the capital. David's son, Solomon, built the first Temple in Jerusalem, where the Ark of the Covenant, the box that supposedly held the original draft of the Ten Commandments, was enclosed. The illustration on the left is an artist's conception of the interior of the First Temple.

After Solomon's death in 926 BC, the kingdom split in two. The northern kingdom called itself Israel, and its capital was at Samaria. The southern kingdom called itself Judah, and its capital was at Jerusalem. But collectively, the people were all known as Judeans, or Jews, the name which came to be applied to all the Hebrews collectively. Also around this time, a series of prophets appeared to warn the Hebrews to follow the laws of Yawheh—or else.

In 722 BC, the or else started. The Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians. The people of the northern tribes were dispersed and lost their identity as Hebrews, sometimes called "The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel." (If you are Mormon, you already know about the "ten lost tribes," but if not, PBS Nova site has an interesting page on their fate.

In 586 BC, the Babylonians captured the Kingdom of Judah, destroyed the First Temple, after which many people were removed to Babylon. The so-called Babylonian Captivity lasted forty years.

The actual appearance of Solomon's temple is a matter of speculation.

In 538 BC, the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylonia and allowed the Judean exiles to go home, where they rebuilt the Temple, known now as the Second Temple. A great deal is known about this structure,

and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem maintains a spectacular outdoor model of Jerusalem and the Second Temple as they would have appeared around 70 AD.

Believing God had rescued them from the Babylonians, the Hebrews established a theocracy (a government run by religious leaders), the first of several significant changes to this world. One change came as a direct result of the time spent in Persia, where the Hebrews had been exposed to the popular Persian religion Zoroastrianism. Founded by a Persian prophet known as Zoroaster (also called Zarathustra), this religion believes in one god also, but from there Zoroaster goes off in a different direction. Among other beliefs, Zorastrianism stresses the interplay of the twin forces of Light and Dark, a notion which influenced the development of early Christian thought, specifically the Zoroastrian concept of Satan as the prince of darkness, and the dualism of heaven and hell.

Also around this same time, the Jews began to become concerned with eschatology (concern for the end of the world) and apocalypse (the coming of God and the day of judgment) and the Messiah, who would appear on that day of judgment to lead the faithful to the new life.

During the period of the Second Temple, the Hebrews begin to gather and edit the documents that contain their history. These are known collectively as the Torah, or the Pentateuch, and they correspond to the first five books of the Christian Old Testament. (See the illustration on the right.) Somewhere around 90 AD, the Hebrew Bible was then set in its final form, which is in three parts: the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. In the third century AD, the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, a version known as the Septuagint because supposedly seventy scholars worked on it.

One detail of the Hebrew Bible we should note here is God's consistently negative opinion of human nature. Over and over, human beings are tested and found wanting, and adherence to the strict commands of Yahweh seems almost unattainable. The covenant with Abraham (which started all of this in the first place) did include the idea of redemption, that God would forgive the Jews for their sins. But even so, God was clearly vindictive.

Alexander the Great conquered Judah in 332 BC, and after his death, Palestine became part of the Seleucid (sih-LOO-sid) kingdom. In 168 BC, the Seleucid king Antiochus IV tried to impose the Greek gods on the Jews, and he went so far as to order a statue of Zeus be installed in the Second Temple! You can imagine how well that went over! The Maccabean clan led a revolt that recaptured the Temple and then ruled Judah as an independent commonwealth for about 100 years.

That all ended In 63 BC when the Romans conquered Palestine. The Herod dynasty, a family of Jews who got along well with the Romans, became the Romans' surrogate rulers. Herod the Great who ruled from 37 to 4 BC made civic improvements to the city of Jerusalem and also restored the Second Temple. However, the relationship between the Romans and the Jews remained volatile and would soon ignite into a full-scale revolt.

In this context, Christianity began.

Section Two: Early Christianity

Following the Babylonian Captivity, the Jews enjoyed almost two hundred years of self-determination before Alexander the Great conquered Palestine. For the next two hundred years or so, the Seleucid kings were the Jews' overlords. Then the Maccabeans wrested control from the Seleucids, but that ended with conquest by the Romans in 63 BC. Since that time, relations between the Jews and the Romans went from bad to worse.

The Kingdom Movement

As the first century AD began (and remember, we're talking about our calendar, not theirs), many Jews were thinking about the Jewish tradition which held that one day, a messiah (an "anointed one") would appear and overthrow all the Jews' oppressors and establish God's Kingdom on earth. Some Jews began to believe God's Kingdom was coming sooner, rather than later, and these people constituted a kind of loosely organized group known as the Kingdom Movement.

As the Reverend Wright suggests in the previous clip, a number of Kingdom Movement prophets had begun preaching well before the time of Jesus. Also, some of these prophets had been affected by the thinking of a group known as the Pharisees.

Eugen Weber, a professor of history at UCLA, wrote and delivered a series of lectures for a 1989 PBS series called The Western Tradition. In the eleventh program, "Early Christianity," Weber described the Pharisees as an extremely pious Jewish sect dedicated to studying and interpreting the scriptures.

When Jesus was thought to be in his twenties, he met a Kingdom prophet known to us as John the Baptist. For a time, Jesus may have been a follower of John, but eventually, he broke away and started preaching his own version of the Kingdom message. Scholar Claudia Setzer makes the following points about the way that Jesus may have interpreted the Kingdom Movement: "In some way God would act in history (or was now acting) to effect a change in society as they knew it. Whether this would be at some future time [ . . . ] or already present in his ministry [ . . . ] or as a dynamic drama in its first stage, so both present and future [ . . . ] Jesus preached God's power to effect a reversal of values and the emergence of a just society." (From PBS' Frontline website, From Jesus to Christ, a page entitled "The Historical Jesus." Click here to go to this page.)

However, the Romans had met these Kingdom Movement radicals before and were very concerned about having to put down another armed rebellion. Partly because the Romans believed the Kingdom Movement was going to incite another revolt and partly because Jesus had attracted a large following and was, therefore, an easy target, Jesus was singled out for execution by the particularly unpleasant method of crucifiction somewhere around the year 30 BC. Three days after his death, reports began to circulate that Jesus had risen from the dead. Other incidents followed which tended to suggest that Jesus may have been the messiah that the Jews had been waiting for.

Early Christianity

After the death of Jesus, his followers, the Apostles, regrouped under the leadership of James, who may have been Jesus' brother, and fairly soon after, the followers of Jesus begin to break away from the practices of other Jews—with predictable results.

Meanwhile, the Romans continued to try to snuff out the Kingdom movement as well as the new “Jesus” movement. To help them, the Romans employed Jews who were not in sympathy with either movement. One such Jew employed by the Romans to persecute the radicals was a man named Saul. The following video clip is from a 1999 co production of London Weekend Television and Bravo, a program called The Birth of a New Religion: Christianity in the 1st and 2nd Centuries. The narrator is Melvin Bragg, and the linked segment describes Saul and how he was converted to Christianity.

The people who made that clip probably assumed you already knew the story of the precise events that caused Saul to do this spiritual 180, but in case you don't know the particulars, the story goes like this: Riding on horseback on the road to Damascus, a bright light (and, in some versions, a thunderclap) caused the horse to rear. Saul was thrown to the ground, but before he could rise again, he heard a voice saying, "Saul, why do you persecute me?" This is the event pictured in the painting on the right. If Saul's expression looks a little odd, the reason is that Saul had been struck blind, too, either by the fall or by the bright light..

When he subsequently recovered his sight, he changed his name to Paul, and from that time forward, he turned from persecuting the new Christians to making new converts.

Initially, the Apostles found Saul/Paul's miraculous conversion hard to believe. (I wonder why!) So to help defuse the tension, Paul left Jerusalem and took on the mission of bringing the message of Jesus and the coming of the end of the world to the Roman world, which he knew quite well.

As it happened, there were already gentiles who had been attracted to Judaism. The Romans were very generally tolerant toward other religions, and some of these gentiles were actually attending services in synagogues. They were called "God Fearers" because they were not circumcised and they did not follow Jewish dietary restrictions (explained below). These people were among Paul’s first converts.

Paul had been brought up in the Roman world, and he knew how to tailor his message to whomever would listen. He traveled west through Asia Minor and finally to Rome itself, the center of the gentile world. Along the way, he wrote letters to the new churches—mostly small groups of Christians who were meeting clandestinely in homes. Written mostly between 50 and 62 AD, Paul's letters represent the first attempt to create a Christian theology. For example, Paul is the first one to talk about the idea that Christ died to offer atonement for man's sins dating all the way back to Adam. Paul's theology also stressed ascetic living (meaning self-denial and self-mortification) and sexual chastity, the beginning of the Roman Catholic Church's doctrine that sex, except for purposes of procreation, is bad.

Paul's Letter to the Romans

The letter offers us a chance to hear Paul in his own words, and the letter to the Romans sums up many of his key ideas. Of particular significance is Paul's hostility to all matters of the flesh. In the section

marked Chapter Seven, you will find Paul's famous remark, "For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh."

Back in Jerusalem, the apostles began to become upset that Paul's successes were leaving Judaism behind. The split was over the attitude towards God's law—can parts of God's law be left aside? Paul decreed that gentiles need not follow kosher rules for eating, but not everyone agreed. In Jerusalem, some insisted that all converts must follow Jewish law. To resolve the issue, James convened a council in 49 AD. After lengthy debate, the gentiles were allowed directly into Christianity, and the split between Judaism and the new Jesus movement began to widen.

Persecution of the Christians and the Zealots

In the meantime, the early Christian movement had begun to generate a lot of bad press among the unbelievers.

Part of the reason why Nero's explanation for the fire found such ready acceptance is that Jewish opposition to Roman domination had been heating up, and Rome found that it was going to have to deal with a group that it thought it already stamped out: the Zealots. Going back to the year 6 AD, the Romans had ordered a census for purposes of tax collection, and a man named Judas of Galilee had organized opposition. His followers were known as the Zealots, and an extremist faction of that group began terrorist tactics against Roman officials. What they were unhappy about wasn't particularly the census or the taxes; the primary problem was that the Romans insisted that everyone worship the emperor, and the Zealots argued that practice was incompatible with God’s commandments given to Moses. (One god only, remember?) In time, the rebellion was put down, and many of the Zealots were killed—but unfortunately for the Romans, not all of them, including the Apostle Simon.

In the year 66 AD, another rebellion against the Romans broke out, probably organized by the Zealots. This time, the Romans decided on more decisive measures, something on the order of the way they had torched Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War and then dug salt into the ground. To try to crush this and all future rebellions, the Romans launched a full-scale military assault on Palestine. These events were recorded by a Jewish historian named Josephus.

Following the destruction of the Second Temple, the Christians made themselves even less popular with the Jews by suggesting that the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple had been God's way of punishing the Jews for having caused the death of His son.

The Zealots may have been down, but they were but not out, and they decided to make a last stand at a place called Masada. Herod the Great, who had ruled as the Romans' puppet king of Judea from 37 BC to 4 AD, had built himself a magnificent palace on the summit of Masada. No slouch as an engineer, Herod had installed a great reservoir that collected and preserved what little rain fell up there; the system worked so well that provided enough water for a thousand people for a year. The place was deserted when the Zealots arrived, but they figured the Romans could never attack them there.

Sadly, they underestimated the Romans' determination.

If you're interested in more information and some excellent photographs, the BiblePlaces.com site has some very nice pictures. For a more comprehensive site about Masada and more photographs (click on the "Gallery" tab), I recommend the UNESCO site devoted to Masada. Today, Masada is actually not that hard to visit. Organized tours are available; buses pick you up at your hotel, and you get to the top of Masada by cable car.

Christianity's Expanding Influence

Meanwhile, back in Rome, all organized attempts to stamp out the rapidly spreading influence of Christianity seemed to fail.

In fact, the public torture and executions of Christians in the arena seemed to produce exactly the opposite effect that the Romans wanted. Most Christian martyrs faced death with a remarkably stoic resolve—a real "buzz killer" for the people who came to the arena to hear screams of terror. Many stories have survived of the behavior of these Christian martyrs. For example, Blandina, a young slave girl, bravely endured three days of torture in the arena before dying as depicted on the left. (If you're morbidly curious or if you think you've had a bad day, you can read a brief version of her story here.) In sum, the public executions seemed only to raise interest in the new religion—even in spite of the rumors about weird cult practices. Any religion that could provide its followers with such quiet courage in the face of torture and violent death had to have something going for it!

Furthermore, the new religion promised a better deal was coming in the next world. Anyone who was worried about the general decline of the empire could find comfort in that belief. For that reason, the new religion had a special appeal to women and slaves because their life in this world was usually very grim. Roman men, on the other hand, were largely attracted to the cult of Mithraism (discussed in the previous section). Mithraism was open only to men and only to those men who could afford to pay a steep initiation fee to join. Roman soldiers particularly found Mithraism appealing because it functioned like an exclusive fraternity (much as the Freemasons continue to function today). However, Christianity welcomed everyone—membership was not restricted, and eventually, Roman wives even began to convince their husbands to sign up.

Remarkably, the organized persecution of Christians continued almost without pause through the mid-third century AD. In spite of that fact—or perhaps because of that fact—the number of Christians in the Roman Empire continued to expand. By the end of the third century, the church had reached a membership of somewhere around five million people, or about a tenth of the empire,

Fearful of persecution nevertheless, Christians gathered secretly in private homes to worship together. Eventually, though, a movement started to bring some semblance of organization to all the little house churches. Enter Ignatius, who began to give the new Christian church a semblance of structure.

The Gospels

As mentioned above, Jesus died somewhere around the year 30 AD, but the first accounts of the life of Jesus were not actually written down until somewhere after the year 70 AD. The first three of these accounts appear in the New Testament as the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Because these three accounts were supposedly written by eye-witnesses to the events described, they are known as the synoptic gospels. The word "synoptic" is derived from the Greek word “syn,” meaning “together,” and the Greek word “opsis,” meaning “view”. The word "gospel" is derived from the Old English word "godspel," meaning roughly "good news" (from the online Merriam-Webster site). All three synoptic gospels take the same essential point of view toward their subject. Later, a fourth gospel appeared, the Book of John, and this book seems to treat Jesus somewhat differently, emphasizing the idea of being born again to eternal life after death.

Collectively, the four gospels are thought to reveal a sort of schism that developed among the members of the early Christian churches. The issue was whether or not gentiles had to convert to Judasim before they could become Christians. Mark’s gospel appears to support Paul’s approach and seems, therefore, fairly critical of the Jews. Matthew’s gospel takes the opposite view and emphasizes the importance of Peter, who is named the “rock” on which the Christian church was founded. Luke’s gospel appears to try to ignore or possibly even cover up the whole controversy, as if he were trying to deny the schism ever existed. Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles, which is a sort of history of the early church, and this book openly rejects many Jewish practices, including Jewish dietary laws and the necessity of circumcision. In other words, the gospels clearly show that the Christian movement was divided from the very beginning, a problem that will become even more apparent in the next study unit.

Jewish Dietary Laws

The issue of Jewish dietary laws has come up in this section more than once, so here's what we're talking about:

"Although the details of kashrut ['proper or correct'] are extensive, the laws all derive from a few fairly simple, straightforward rules:

1. Certain animals may not be eaten at all [see below]. This restriction includes the flesh, organs, eggs and milk of the forbidden animals.

2. Of the animals that may be eaten, the birds and mammals must be killed in accordance with Jewish law.

3. All blood must be drained from meat and poultry or broiled out of it before it is eaten.4. Certain parts of permitted animals may not be eaten.5. Fruits and vegetables are permitted, but must be inspected for bugs (which cannot be

eaten)6. Meat (the flesh of birds and mammals) cannot be eaten with dairy. Fish, eggs, fruits,

vegetables and grains can be eaten with either meat or dairy. (According to some views, fish may not be eaten with meat).

7. Utensils (including pots and pans and other cooking surfaces) that have come into contact with meat may not be used with dairy, and vice versa. Utensils that have come into contact with non-kosher food may not be used with kosher food. This applies only where the contact occurred while the food was hot.

8. Grape products made by non-Jews may not be eaten."

from Judaism 101, "Kashrut: Jewish Dietary Laws." Click here to see the whole page.

What Animals Are Forbidden?

"Of the "beasts of the earth" (which basically refers to land mammals with the exception of swarming rodents), you may eat any animal that has cloven hooves and chews its cud. [ . . . ] Any land mammal that does not have both of these qualities is forbidden. The Torah specifies that the camel, the rock badger, the hare and the pig are not kosher because each lacks one of these two qualifications. Sheep, cattle, goats and deer are kosher.

Of the things that are in the waters, you may eat anything that has fins and scales. [ . . . ] Thus, shellfish such as lobsters, oysters, shrimp, clams and crabs are all forbidden. Fish like tuna, carp, salmon and herring are all permitted.

[ . . . ] As mentioned above, any product derived from these forbidden animals, such as their milk, eggs, fat, or organs, also cannot be eaten. Rennet, an enzyme used to harden cheese, is often obtained from non-kosher animals, thus kosher hard cheese can be difficult to find."

from The Jewish Virtual Library, "Kashrut: Jewish Dietary Laws." Click here to see the complete page.

So, no cheeseburgers, no calamari, no bacon, and you can't drink milk with dinner if you're having beef. Pass the Kool-Aid. In fact, if you're really going to keep a kosher kitchen, you need two sets of dishes and two sets of cooking utensils, one for meat and one for meals with dairy products.

In the second century AD, the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s epistles (along with several epistles attributed to him but probably not actually written by him), and the Book of Revelation (possibly authored by the apostle John) were selected as the official Christian scriptures, or as we know them now, the New Testament. (More about how those particular works were selected in the next study unit.)

In addition to Paul and the authors of the gospels, two other early Christian writers are worth noting here: Tertullian and Origen.

Tertullian (160-230 AD) is noteworthy because his writings rejected the Greco-Roman humanistic heritage—enough of that Man is the Measure of All Things. Click here to access a site with lots of information about him. (If you go to that site, I recommend you click on the link "Read this first" under "Never heard of him?" but this site is really more for devout Christians than for the general reader. Click here to go to a site that just provides his works in English.

On the other hand, Origen (185-254 AD) did not abandon all humanistic learning; he liked Platonism and Stoicism because they were consistent with the ascetic nature of Christian

thinking. Click here to go to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy page for Origen. More information that you probably want to know, but read the first first long paragraph you see to get the general idea. Click here to access his works in English.

One way or another, Christianity had become a growing presence in the Roman world and would soon be a force for some major changes in the structure and even the location of the Roman Empire.

Section Three: From Augustus to Constantine

Note: For many of the details on the lives of the Roman emperors described below, I am indebted to a marvelous online history of Rome. Click here to see this site.

Augustus, Rome's first emperor, reigned from 27 BC to 14 AD. During this period, he restored peace and prosperity, and his reign is generally considered a sort of Golden Age, one of the last that Rome would enjoy. After Augustus' death, the Roman world was anything but peaceful. The following is a brief summary of the emperors who followed Augustus to the ascension of Constantine, the emperor who finally moved the empire out of Rome.

The Flavian Emperors

Augustus died in 14 AD, and he was succeeded as emperor by his adopted son Tiberius (r. 14-37 AD). These years were relatively uneventful, but Tiberius was succeeded by his nephew, Caligula (r. 37-41 AD), who has the deserved reputation of being the most dissipated and loony of all the Roman emperors. He probably started out all right, but during his reign, he fell victim to some kind of illness, and when he recovered, he had apparently gone mad. He was assassinated by an officer of the praetorian guards (the emperor’s bodyguards).

Caligula was then succeeded by his uncle Claudius (r. 41-54 AD). He apparently suffered from some crippling birth defects that led other people to believe he was feeble-minded. However, he was anything but! After Caligula’s assassination, members of the army decided that Claudius would be the next emperor, and we presume they thought he would be a mere figurehead that they could manipulate as they desired. They forced the Senate to approve Claudius, but then, Claudius surprised everyone by functioning superbly as emperor. He was very intelligent and an excellent administrator—he even led a successful military campaign to expand Roman territory in Gaul. However, his personal life was a disaster and the subject of much mockery. Even so, he managed to achieve something that few other emperors did: He died of old age peacefully in his own bed.

One of the key features of any Roman city was the public baths, and when the Romans invaded chilly Britain, they made a happy discovery in the area known today as Somerset: a thermal spring! So, the Romans built a spa, and when Claudius was in Britain, he supposedly ordered several improvements. Today, the Roman

Baths are a tourist attraction in the city of Bath (wonder how it got that name?), although you can't bathe there anymore. Click here to visit the official site—I recommend you click on the link for the Walkthrough, and then click on the link for the 360° tour.

And remember: tea in the Pump Room at four o'clock sharp!

Claudius, sadly, was succeeded by another loser, his adopted son Nero (r. 54-68). Initially, Nero’s reign was directed primarily by advisers, including the Stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca. These would be the last good years that Rome would know for a long time. In 59 AD, Nero seems to have suffered the same fate as Caligula and gone bonkers. He had his own mother (Claudius’ third wife) killed, and subsequently, he divorced his own wife so he could marry another woman, Poppaea Sabina, who was a disastrous influence on him and who later died of abuse. (Actually, the story is that Nero kicked her to death when she was pregnant!) The Great Fire of 64 AD did nothing to improve Nero’s popularity, and finally—deserted by his friends and despised by everyone—he committed suicide in 68 AD.

Nero was followed by three short-lived emperors: Galba (assassinated), Otho (committed suicide after a disastrous military defeat), and Vitellius (dragged through the streets, tortured, and thrown into the Tiber).

These guys were succeeded by Vespasian (r. 69-79 AD). By this point in Rome’s history, the process of succession was now clear: the army would choose the emperor. No one could be emperor unless the Army approved. Vespasian was then the most powerful and best-liked general in the Army, and so he was the logical person to be promoted to the position of emperor. (It was early in his reign, by the way, that the Romans suppressed the revolt in Jerusalem and torched the Second Temple.) Vespasian did his best to restore decency in public and private life, and the rest of his reign was relatively calm.

Vespasian was succeeded by his son, Titus (r. 79-81). He started off as a good emperor, known for fairness, but in the first year of his short reign, Mt. Vesuvius erupted and obliterated the Roman cities of Pompeii and

Herculaneum—a clear signal from the gods that stormy seas were ahead for Rome. Titus died unexpectedly in 81 AD, and he was succeeded by his brother Domitian (81-96 AD), and he was cut from the same cloth as

Caligula and Nero. His reign was known for depravity and weird religious practices. A major plot against him culminated in his assassination in 96

AD.

If you'd like to wander around a Roman city, two of the most interesting are Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in ash when Mr. Vesuvius erupted on August 24, 79 AD. Check here to go directly to a nice translation of Pliny's eyewitness account of the eruption.

The excavations are today major tourist attractions near modern Naples, and

if you can't go there yourself, there are many ways to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum on the Internet. There are videos on YouTube, but I recommend you have a look at these two sites instead:

Click here for "The Forgotten City of Pompeii" from a site called Tour of Italy for the Financially Challenged. The pages are full of pictures and the organization is good—plus, I like their attitude!

Click here for the somewhat dumbed-down Harcourt School site on Pompeii. There are pix and reconstructions and several interactive features, including some 360 degree pix. All in all, not a bad site.

The death of Domitian ended the line of succession that dated back to Augustus—the so-called Flavian line—and the leadership of the empire than took a new direction.

The “Five Good Emperors”

From the army, no obvious candidates for succession presented themselves, so the Senate got to pick this one, and they chose Nerva (r. 96-98). A good man, he was not a born leader, but he was from an old and respected family, and his one major accomplishment was to name his successor: Trajan (r. 98-117 AD), who was on the battlefield near the Rhine when his appointment was announced, and he took care to finish business in the field before returning to Rome to take over his new office. He proved to be a fair and conscientious emperor, but he was more successful as a conqueror, and he did much to enlarge Rome’s territory. Apparently, he wanted to repeat the achievements of Alexander the Great, but he died of natural causes before that dream could be realized.

One of Rome's popular tourist landmarks is Trajan's column, created as the centerpiece of a new forum constructed between 106-112 AD. The column is so tall and the frieze is so long that it cannot be fully appreciated in person. However, for a leisurely and detailed look at the details, click here for detailed views of the entire frieze and more info than you could ever want to know.

For more information on Trajan's Forum, where the column stands, and also Trajan's Market, click here. (The link is to A View on Cities site, specifically the page on Rome, and on the left side of the page are links to other intersting places in Rome. Got your passport?)

The artists who created this vertical scrolling graphic novel may have realized that some viewers might suffer from short attention spans, so if you stand in one particular spot and follow the pictures up, you get a sort of digest version of the story.

Trajan was succeeded by the emperor Hadrian (r. 117-138), and he recognized that further expansion of Roman territory was not in Rome’s best interests. Therefore, he focused more on strengthening the provincial governors than on managing events in Rome. One of his most enduring accomplishments was the building of the famous wall in England.

Between 120-130 AD, the Emperor Hadrian had a wall constructed across part of Britain. The ruins of this wall still stand.

Click here to visit Britain's tourist site for information about seeing Hadrian's Wall today.

Unfortunately, Hadrian was not particularly tolerant of the Jews, and he managed to provoke another Jewish revolt in the year 131. The revolt was eventually suppressed, but only after disastrous cost to the Jews—nearly 600,000 men killed and nearly a thousand Jewish villages destroyed.

Later in life, Hadrian’s mental and physical state began to deteriorate, and he began to acquire a reputation for cruelty. Disease finally took his life in 138 AD.

Hadrian nominated his successor, Antonius (138-161), a mature Senator. His long reign was notable because it was free from incident, thus providing Rome a few unaccustomed years of calm.

Antonius was succeeded by his adopted son Marcus Aurelius (161-180). He is best remembered as an exponent of Stoicism, which advocated the universal brotherhood of man. Ironically, he was forced by circumstance to spend most of time in the field as a general. Most of his campaigns were directed toward suppressing revolts against Roman authority, but one of his campaigns succeeded in bringing a horrific outbreak of plague back to Rome. Marcus Aurelius subscribed to the theory that disease was a divine punishment for some form of wrongdoing, and he decided—much as Nero had tried to persuade the Roman public—that the Christians were at fault. As a result, the persecution of the Christians, which had somewhat subsided, was renewed with a new intensity.

He was succeeded by his son Commodus (r. 180-192). He was only nineteen years of age when he got the job—unlike his father, who had been appointed to the job at the age of forty. His youth and inexperience (and, perhaps, lack of character) made him ill-suited to the job. He was only somewhat effective as a military leader, but his private life supposedly rivaled Nero’s. He was assassinated in his bed by a professional athlete hired to strangle him. (By the way, the Ridley Scott film Gladiator was loosely based on the reign of Commodus.)

Chaos followed.

And the Romans would have known better if they had listened to the chickens!

The Romans were very suspicious people, and they used all manner of devices to try to divine the future. In a recent report from National Public Radio, we learn to what lengths the Romans would go to learn the future. Click here to go to a page where you can hear this report. Worth it! (No transcript—sorry!)

Too Many Emperors

Commodus was followed by Pertinax (r. 193-193), who was an old soldier and, it was hoped, a fitting replacement for Commodus—the first of the so-called "soldier emperors." But Pertinax's reign ended after only six months. According to the Roman history website, “He lasted for a mere three months, until the praetorians mutinied, broke into the palace, murdered Pertinax, paraded his head through the streets on a pike, and offered the imperial throne to the highest bidder." (Do you think he was missed?)

Pertinax was replaced by Julianus (r. 193-193), who, like Pertinax, lasted for a mere three months because the army disagreed with the Praetorian guard’s choice. He was killed as soon as the army’s choice—the next emperor—arrived in Rome.

Severus (r. 193-211) ended the revolving door in the emperor’s palace. Early in his reign, he focused his efforts primarily on eliminating his potential rivals for the office. Severus was thoroughly a military man, and throughout his reign, he kept his focus on the army and left the running of the city of Rome to the Prefect of Rome, a position which began to rise in importance in the following years.

Severus named his own successor, his son, who became known as Caracalla (r. 211-217), and he was an idiot. He was known for savage cruelty, but he courted the approval of the army. Finally, a group of discontented officers murdered him.

During the reign of Caracalla, construction was begun on a magnificent structure known now as the Baths of Caracalla. Completed in 217 AD, the building could accommodate well over a thousand bathers and served as a major social and leisure center for Rome. Today, the ruins are a popular tourist destination and are sometimes used as the site for open-air theatre and opera. For more pictures and info, click here to go to the Livius.org site page on the Baths of Caracalla. Note: the pictures are all thumbnails. Click on each pic to see a larger image.

The assassins favored one of their own number as next emperor: Macrinus (r. 217-218), who barely lasted a year as emperor before he was murdered by another group of soldiers. As a result of their efforts, a fourteen-year-old boy was promoted to emperor: Elagabalus (r. 218-222). He was believed to be a legitimate descendent of Severus, but most historians disagree. Spiritually, though, he was a direct descendent of Caligula and Nero. His reign was notorious for excesses of luxury and lust. He was eventually slain by his own Praetorian guard, who and been drawn into a plot to put in place the next emperor.

Alexander Severus (r. 222-235) was only sixteen-years-old when he was promoted to Emperor, but his reign is considered a period of relative calm and prosperity. Alexander Severus had one major military victory, but eventually, he lost the favor of the army, and he was assassinated by mutinying soldiers.

Between 238 and 249, the empire went through seven more emperors who were more concerned with eliminating their rivals than doing anything else. They were all murdered by their own soldiers or killed in battle. The empire was in complete collapse.

The Barbarian Threat

The next emperor, however, made a valiant effort to pull Rome back from the brink: Decius (r. 249-251). Unfortunately, he was killed leading Roman troops against the Goths. He was followed by Trebonius Gallus (r. 251-253), who negotiated peace with the Goths on terms that were not favorable to Rome. In fact, the Goths were encouraged by their success to become an even greater threat to Rome. Trebonius was later killed by his own troops. He was followed by Aemilian, who managed to last three months before he was killed by his own troops.

Next in line was Valerian (r. 253-260), who was a competent soldier, but during his reign, the Goths continued to become a problem while a new threat from Persia began to emerge. Valerian proved incapable of handling this threat, and eventually, he was captured by the Persians and died in captivity (as depicted in the Persian bas relief on the left).

The capture of Valerian was the beginning of a major loss of territory in the Middle East. The next emperor was Gallienus (r. 253-268). His reign was relatively long for the third century but was entirely consumed with fighting the Persians and the Goths. At one point, the Goths broke through Roman lines and, moving into the Balkans, threatened to sack Athens, but Gallienus managed to turn them back. He was eventually murdered as a result of a conspiracy involving the Praetorians and his successor, Claudius II Gothicus (r. 268-270).

However, all the problems in the eastern empire meant a weakening of control in the western empire, and between 260-274, the western provinces declared their independence, forming what was known as the Gallic Empire.

Plague in the army camp took down Claudius II Gothicus, and he was replaced by Quintillus, who lasted a month, and then by Aurelian (r. 270-275). He managed to restore some order and negotiated a new treaty with the Goths. But in the eastern empire, a new threat had emerged in the presence of a female leader Zenobia, the queen of the kingdom of Palmyra (east of present-day Syria). Aurelian eventually captured her and displayed her in Rome. In the end, Aurelian was murdered by members of his own staff.

Zenobia, the "warrior queen" of Palmyra during the third century AD, was probably Arab, and she led her people in a prolonged revolt against the Romans. The exact dates of her life are not known, but she was one of many "warrior queens" to rule in the territories of Syria and Abyssinia. She often rode into battle with her generals, and at one time, her empire included all of modern Turkey.

Click here for a page with more information about her life and the tradition of the "warrior queens."

Tacitus (r. 275-276) followed Aurelian, but his brief reign was entirely consumed with fighting the Goths and the Persians.

For the next several years (275-284), the chaos only heightened. The empire went through five more emperors, and the barbarians continued to make inroads on the empire’s territory.

The Empire Divides

Diocletian (r. 284-311) was a soldier, but he had the heart and soul of a bureaucrat. And he was something of a realist. He recognized that the empire as a single unit was not functioning, and in the year 286, he undertook a major reorganization of the empire, starting with a division of the one empire into a western empire and an eastern empire. The map below shows this division.

Diocletian gave himself control over the eastern half, and he appointed Maximius to be the emperor of the west and Africa. For themselves, they each took the title of “Augustus,” and Diocletian further appointed two sort of vice emperors, who were understood to be the successors to each "Augustus," and each of these was given the title of "Caesar." Thus, the empire was to be ruled by two Augusti and two Caesars; this arrangement was known as the tetrarchy, and it may have seemed a good idea at the time—particularly because it stipulated the path of succession—but in practice, it never worked as planned. The photo on the right depicts how the tetrarchs were supposed to get along.

Additionally, Diocletian reorganized the provinces and Italy into 116 administrative divisions, each with its own governor, and these divisions were then grouped into twelve dioceses, and each of these had a head administrator, too. He also resumed systematic persecution of the Christians. Some historians have suggested that he actually wanted to eradicate the religion completely, a sort of “final solution” for the Christian problem. This fact suggests that the religion must have become sufficiently strong during the previous two centuries to merit this kind of drastic solution.

Then, in the year 305 AD, Diocletian did something that no previous emperor had ever done: he abdicated, and by default, forced Maximius to do the same. For the next six years, Diocletian was effectively retired; he worked in his garden and had nothing further to do with the empire, and he died peacefully in his sleep—something else that no previous emperor had managed to do in more than two centuries.

Following Diocletian’s retirement, the whole system erupted into rivalries and factions, and Rome was awash in chaos again until the year 313 AD.

But the old saying goes, “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” and a new dawn was coming.

Constantine (r. 306-37)

As various prominent Roman generals vied with each other to see who would be an “Augustus” and who would be a “Caesar," one of their number, Constantine, began to emerge as a favorite of the soldiers.

A few details not covered in the video clip: At the Milvian Bridge, Constantine saw a vision of a flaming sword in the sky, and on that sword were the first two letters of Christ’s name, “Chi Ro.” Constantine then had his soldiers paint this sign on their shields, and when they were subsequently victorious in battle, Constantine believed that he had won by divine aid.

In Rome, Constantine was welcomed by the Senate, which proclaimed him the Augustus of the west. The other Augustus, Licinius, met with Constantine in the city of Milan in 313, and Licinius agreed to defer to Constantine as the senior Augustus. To seal the deal, Licinius married Constantine’s sister Constantia. Another important product of this meeting was the Edict of Milan, which formally ended the persecution of the Christians.

Relations between Constantine and Licinius were never good. Over the next few years, they quarreled and battled each other, and in 324 AD, Constantine finally defeated Licinius’ army and had Licinius executed. At this point, the empire had a single emperor again.

To commemorate his victory at the Milvian Bridge, Constantine had built this monument, known as the Arch of Constantine, which includes elements plundered from arches built to honor Trajan and Hadrian. Click here to access a site filled with information and photos. Scroll down to find the link to the photos.

Soon after his victory over Licinius in AD 324, Constantine outlawed pagan sacrifices. The treasures of pagan temples were confiscated and used to pay for the construction of new Christian churches. Gladiatorial contests were outlawed and harsh new laws were issued prohibiting sexual immorality.

Constantine also decided the time had come to move the capital of the empire away from Rome, which was too pagan and was becoming too difficult to defend. He apparently considered several alternative locations, but he finally decided on an old Greek city called Byzantium, on the banks of the Bosporus at the eastern end of the Mediterranian. On November 8, 324, he officially established this location as the site of a new city, which he name Constantinople in his own honor. Construction began immediately on the new capital city for the empire.

In later years, he continued to fight the Goths and the Gauls to try to keep the empire’s borders secure, and he died in 337, but not before he had himself baptized as a Christian.

In the next study unit, we will see how relocating the capital city changed Rome in more ways than one, but to conclude this unit, we will examine how early Christianity left its stamp on Roman art and architecture.

Section Four: Early Christian Art

Until the Edict of Milan of 313 AD, Christianity remained an outlaw religion in the Roman empire, and works of art created during this period were limited primarily to symbolic art—images that often depicted pagan scenes but were understood to contain Christian symbolism.

Carved stone reliefs became particularly popular. The figures are typically classically Greek or Roman in form, but the subject matter is heavy with Christian symbolism. An excellent example is the so-called “Christian Orpheus with Animals,” a six-inch high ivory cup dating from the fifth century (from the Abbey Museum in San Columbano, Italy). Orpheus is a character from pagan mythology; in most versions of his story, his wife, Eurydice (pronounced "yuh-RID-uh-see") dies, and he descends into the underworld to try to bring her back. He fails, but he does manage to return from the underworld himself—a kind of resurrection—so images of Orpheus could easily be understood to symbolize Jesus Christ.

Images of Apollo were often made into images of the "good shepherd," a figure that appears constantly in art of the period. The image to the right shows the beardless boy carrying the lamb on his shoulders. The figure dates from the 3rd century AD and comes from the collection of the Vatican. The composition could easily be understood as a pagan image or as a Christian symbol.

The Catacombs

Although Christianity was outlawed until the Edict of Milan in 313, the Romans did respect Christian burial customs and allowed Christian cemeteries outside the city walls. For a variety of practical reasons, these cemeteries were large, underground chambers where the dead were laid to rest in preparation for the anticipated trumpet call that call them all back to life. More than sixty of these catacombs are known to exist in the area of Rome, but only five of these are open for the public to visit, including the Catacombs of St. Callixtus, also known as San Callisto.

Rick Steves, who has produced a popular PBS travel series Rick Steves' Europe, has posted almost all of his shows online.

For more information about all the catacombs of Rome, click here to visit the Wikipedia page, which includes a complete list. For more information about the Catacombs of San Callisto specifically, click here to visit the Worldsiteguides.com page. Â

Some of these burial chambers were decorated with frescoes, statuary, and elaborately carved sarcophagi, such as is depicted below. The Romans seemed to like carved sarcophagi with bas reliefs depicting Christian scenes, so these became a logical place for early Christian symbolic art to appear. The one you see below is in the collection of the Louvre Museum.

The catacombs also feature many frescoes, including this one, from the catacombs of San Callisto. The painting dates from the mid third century. Once again, the shepherd who is caring for his flock is a thinly veiled symbol for Jesus.

Basilicas

However, it is in the area of architecture that the most important artistic developments occur. Partly to express his gratitude for the victory at the Milvian Bridge and partly at the urging of his mother, who had converted to Christianity long before her emperor son, Constantine began building Christian churches and shrines all over the empire, and for the most part, they all followed pretty much the same pattern, derived from a type of building the Romans called a basilica: a long, rectangular structure that Romans had previously built as indoor markets or assembly halls. One of the best surviving examples is Constantine’s Basilica in Trier, Germany,

originally constructed around 310. Trier, by the way, was Constantine's home town, and the locals today claim that it is Germany's oldest town. If you're curious, click here to see the official tourist site in English.

In the photo above, you see the double row of windows. On the left side of the picture above is apse, the curved end with the half-dome above. The apse is the characteristic detail of all basilicas built in this style—and for a purely practical reason!

The need for the apse is easier to see In the interior view of Constantine's basilica you see on the right. In this view, the camera is at the back and you are looking toward the apse. This long, rectangular shape could conceivably start to lean to one side or the other, and then it might simply collapse like a deflated parallelogram under the weight of the roof. However, the curved apse at the end tends to hold the walls upright, bracing them so they can't lean one way or another.

The early Christians seemed to like the high ceiling, which seems to draw the viewer's gaze up towards heaven, but those tall walls then have to be extremely thick to be stable and to support the weight of the roof. Also, walls must be sufficiently thick to allow windows, which are only possible because of the arch at the top. This simple, heavy style would later come to be called Romanesque.

The big drawback to the basilica design, though, is that long space down the center, known as the nave, which has to be relatively narrow because of the difficulty of creating wooden timbers that will span the space. If the congregation expands and wants to enlarge the space, about the only option is to lengthen the nave, but that approach just puts people farther and farther away from the altar at the front.

Actually, the basilica is best suited to small churches, such as this example from the Cloisters, the Medieval Museum owned and maintained by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This room is known as the Langon Chapel, a simple rectangular room with the curved apse at the back. The walls are quite thick, and notice that the ceiling is a barrel vault made entirely of stone.

As stated before, the width of a traditional basilica is the problem because the roof must span the space and the walls must support the roof. However, Christian architects soon figured a way to double the width by pushing out the lower half of the walls and covering them with a lower roof. In this way, a high, soaring nave can be retained with aisles on the sides. Also, nave can still have a high row of windows above the nave, usually called a clerestory.

The diagram on the right shows this widened design as used for the building known as Old St. Peter's Basilica, which Constantine ordered to be constructed in Rome in 333 AD. This building is always referred to as "Old St. Peter's" because it was knocked down and replaced by "New St. Peter's," the basilica which is now the centerpiece of the Vatican.

The inside was still an oblong rectangle with a curved wall, or apse, at the eastern end (which was supposed to be facing Jerusalem). Flanking the nave were two rows of parallel columns that supported the walls above the nave but provided openings to the aisles on the sides. The roof was

taller over the nave, and clerestory windows were placed above the aisle roofs let in light and also to reduce the weight of the walls themselves.

Outside, the main entrance was known as the "Narthex," and it was faced by a cloistered courtyard, through which the worshippers would pass on their way to the main building.

The plan of pushing out the walls to form the aisles had a double benefit. Not only could more worshippers be accommodated, but the aisles also provided additional buttressing to keep the walls from bowing or collapsing. In sum, the wider building was the more stable building, so just about all Churches built after that time until the twentieth century tended to follow this formula.

The diagram on the left provides an artist's reconstruction of the outside of the building from the point of view of the courtyard. Notice the clerestory windows above the aisles and the area identified as the transept in the diagram above. You can quickly see how much more stable this design seems to e than just the plain, boxy basilica. The round building to the left was the baptistry, a structure that was usually separate from most early Christian churches because worshippers needed to be baptized before being admitted as formal members to the congregation.

Another good example of an early Christian church in this Romanesque style is Saint Apollinaire in Classe, near Ravenna, Italy, pictured on the right. Construction on this building began the same year as Old St. Peter's, so the resemblance is hardly coincidental.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Another of Constantine's basilicas was constructed in Jerusalem. Known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it was located on the site believed to be the location of the tomb where the body of Jesus was taken after the Crucifixion.

Before Constantine, a circular Church of the Sepulchre had been built on the same spot, but in the second century AD, the Roman emperor Hadrian was trying to stamp out Christianity, and he had that church knocked down and replaced by a temple dedicated to Venus. Constantine subsequently had that structure torn down and replaced by a basilica again.

However, Constantine’s basilica was destroyed by invaders from Persia in 614, but it was soon reconstructed with few changes in design. In the tenth century, this building was heavily damaged again (we'll get to that story in the unit on the High Middle Ages), but it was restored later by the Crusaders, and their restoration is basically the version that survives today.

At this point, the Roman Empire had a new location and a new religion and was about get a new name, too: the Eastern Roman Empire. But many things would remain the same. Although Constantine hoped that Christianity would unify the Empire, the sad truth is that Christianity was never unified in the first place, and the new Empire wouldn't be any more united than the old.

And Rome still had a lot of old enemies—and some new ones were on the way, too.

Why did he succeed where Akhenaten failed?

The reason Constantine’s religion succeeded is because they believe in their own personal religious principles view of Christianity. They did not have several Gods to start in the first place. They felt that since the Romans had tried and over taken and destroyed Jesus. They thought if they can try and take over Constantine and they did not succeed. Eventually everyone started following the new ways to worship Christianity and later they became the new Christian Roman Empire. At that time, that is when Constantine had created what they called the New Testament in the bible.

The amusing mania is that Constantine’s mother was the first one to convert to Christianity at the same time when the Milvian Bridge had been recognized for its wonderful achievements. Since the Milvian Bridge had show much attention in the public eye, Constantine decided to build more Christian churches like one of the first one he has called Basilica , a roman building. Based on the several designs and styles made on the Basilica the apse is the most feature detail of all. The huge disadvantage of the Basilica building is the nave. The nave was difficult to build because in the historic time, the Romans were not able to create wooden timbers to fill those narrow hallways.